SK puts shares in Goldman-backed Korea Superfreeze on market

SK Group has put its shares in Korea Superfreeze Inc., a cold chain logistics company jointly owned by EMP Belstar and Goldman Sachs, on the market, as part of South Korea's No. 2 conglomerate's restructuring efforts to improve its liquidity, according to people familiar with the situation on Monday.

SK Inc., the investment and holding company of SK Group, recently started the process of selecting its sale manager and accounting firm to assess Korea Superfreeze’s asset value.

Its planned exit from the company, valued at 1 trillion won ($720 million), is about two years earlier than its original divestment schedule as SK Group is jettisoning non-core assets and consolidating its businesses to enhance cash flow. 

SK Inc. holds a 25% stake in Korea Superfreeze and Goldman Sachs controls another 25%. The divestment is expected to fetch between 250 billion and 300 billion won.

SK and Goldman each invested 25 billion won into the cold storage facility operator in 2020 and pumped an additional 12.5 billion won the following year to ride on rapid e-commerce growth.

Korea Suprefreeze was founded in 2015 by EMP Belstar. The energy and infrastructure-focused private equity firm owns the remaining 50% stake in the firm.

EMP, Goldman and SK were aiming to list the company through a real estate investment trust company in Singapore.

They had sought to make it public within the next two years upon completion of Korea Superfreeze’s two additional storage facilities in Incheon bordering Seoul and in Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city.

Currently, it manages three logistics centers: one each in Pyeongtaek, Songsan and Osan in the Seoul Metropolitan Areas.

The addition of the two logistics centers, including one that would be South Korea’s largest ultra-low temperature warehouse, is expected to boost Korea Superfreeze's value, including property assets, to 2 trillion won.

Korea Superfreeze offers one-stop logistics services to food distributors and e-commerce companies such as Coupang Inc., Kurly Inc., Samsung Welstory Inc. and Hyundai Green Food Co.

It is the first storage company in South Korea to use cold energy extracted from liquefied natural gas (LNG) frozen at 162 degrees Celsius below zero to refrigerate vast storage warehouses and maintain them at 75 degrees below zero Celsius or colder. 

Its warehouse in Pyeongtaek was used as the sole storage facility for Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines in South Korea that needed to be kept at 70 degrees below zero.

In 2023, Korea Superfreeze widened its net loss to 6.5 billion won from the 4.5 billion won loss the year previous. But revenue increased to 25.69 billion won from 18.46 billion won over the same period.

Write to Ji-Eun Ha at hazzys@hankyung.com


Yeonhee Kim edited this article.