Coway

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About Coway

Company overview

Coway has promoted a healthy and comfortable life for consumers as its meaning suggest; always together. Coway products include air purifiers, water filtration devices, digital bidets, megasonic cleaning device, and other well-being home appliances. Coway’s industry-leading market share in Korea ranges from over 50 percent for water filtration devices to 40 percent for air purifiers. Currently, more than one out of four Koreans use Coway water filtration devices, and one out of ten uses Coway’s air purifiers. Last year, Coway achieved KRW 1,117 billion (USD 1.2 billion) in revenue, representing a 10.9 percent increase from the year before.

As some of Coway’s high-tech products can have a high initial cost to consumers when they first hit the market, Coway adopted a rental business model in 1998 to make them more accessible. As the cost to consumers decreased over time, people began widely adopting the products. Coway’s attentive after-rental service also raised its corporate reputation with cody system, a trained purifier expert visited customers regularly, changing filters and ensuring that products are in optimal condition, free of charge. In 2006, the number of Cody System experts had risen to 11,000 with customers nationwide numbering over four million.

In 2003, Coway enlarges its business to go global with our first overseas business starting in Japan. Coway then expanded to Thailand, China, and Malaysia. This May, Coway also opened its first U.S. subsidiary in Los Angeles, signaling its commitment to the U.S. market. As for the European market, Coway has set up a number of logistics bases and is planning to establish subsidiaries shortly. In the global market, Coway makes localization its top priority. Coway will modify its renowned Cody System to meet the needs of US consumers, for instance. To reach new customers it will employ both dealer networks and direct to customer sales. The look and functions of products will also be adjusted for the US. After starting with the limited number of outlets in major cities such as Los Angeles and New York, Coway plans to enter major retail outlets by 2008.

Amidst a rapid society-wide transformation including massive corporate failures, triggered by economic difficulties that had ensued foreign currency crisis in 1998, Coway was able to turn crisis into opportunity by introducing a pioneering rental marketing technique that laid the basis for prosperity. Our approach was taken from a value-stream perspective. To be more specific, we shifted away from a conventional marketing approach based on a simple loop linked by production, sales, and after-sales service. We instead moved towards building deeper and more sophisticated layers of customer service mechanism--first embedding our corporate ethics into products, developing a multitude of environmental well-being products, and intensively training our employees to serve our customers before any need arises (B/S or Before Service), then renting out or selling our products to customers, followed by after-sales care that inevitably comes after rental marketing. As rental marketing requires consistent product maintenance, our consumers have come to feel much more reassured in using our products and even save costs thanks to affordable rental pricing.

Under the CODY system- developed for the fact that the main user group for rental products is housewives, CODYs are responsible for door-to-door sales and after-sales care services to customers. In 1999, CODYs were selected as new intellectuals by the Korean Ministry of Labor, thus emerged as a new category in occupation. There are currently 10,751 CODYs working as of the end of 2006. Woongjin Coway has been strengthening service and technology training toCODYs to deepen customer satisfaction, and has equipped CODYs with PDAs to improve their productivity on the job. We plan to expand the number of CODYs to 15,000 and implement an IT-based geographical intelligence system (GIS) to better manage and upgrade the quality of our services.