Wire reporting: (Reuters, via CNA)

South Korea's Fair Trade Commission said Monday it will fine Woowa Brothers Corp., operator of the Baemin delivery app, 331.1 billion won ($243 million) and Coupang Corp. 300.8 billion won for abusing market dominance in food delivery¹.

A Reuters report carried by Channel NewsAsia focused on Coupang, stating a 300.8 billion won ($220.59 million) fine for requiring merchants to match favorable terms on rival platforms².

Yonhap, citing the FTC, said Baemin and Coupang Eats accounted for 58.45 percent and 34.44 percent of South Korea's food-delivery app market by order value in 2025¹.

The watchdog said both companies pressed partner restaurants to offer terms at least as favorable as those on competing platforms, a most-favored-nation practice it said weakened competition, raised food prices and made entry harder for new apps¹.

According to Yonhap, Coupang enforced the terms from July 2023 to January 2026 by stripping restaurants of Wow restaurant status if they did not match conditions on menu prices, minimum orders and other terms¹. That status let Wow membership subscribers get delivery-related benefits from participating restaurants¹.

Baemin imposed similar requirements from May 2024 to October 2025, limiting delivery-fee discounts for Baemin Club subscribers to restaurants that met its conditions, Yonhap reported¹. The FTC said restaurants had little choice because exclusion from the membership programs could cut sales sharply¹.

Yonhap said the share of partner restaurants designated as Wow restaurants rose from 13 percent in July 2023 to 94 percent in October 2025, and Baemin Club stores from 63 percent in May 2024 to 80 percent in January 2025¹.

With the two firms holding more than 90 percent of the market, the FTC said their simultaneous MFN terms restricted competition in a way similar to collusion, Yonhap reported¹.

The commission also sanctioned Baemin for pushing restaurants from Market Place, where restaurants arrange deliveries themselves, toward Own Delivery, where the platform handles them¹. FTC estimates cited by Yonhap put Baemin's revenue share of transaction value at 28 percent for Own Delivery orders in 2024 versus 7.8 percent for Market Place¹.

Yonhap said the FTC expected the measures to give restaurants more freedom to set prices and minimums across platforms and to encourage new platforms¹. The fine amounts are provisional¹. A separate Coupang case on tying delivery and streaming to Wow membership was ordered reexamined¹.

Neither company's on-record response was included in the Yonhap account or the Reuters copy carried by CNA^1,2.