Socar said it is pushing to set up a self-driving-focused subsidiary with planned investment of 150 billion won, a level it described as among the largest in South Korea’s autonomous driving services sector. Video game company Krafton will join the project as a strategic investor.
Socar said Thursday the new company is expected to be established in May. Socar CEO Park Jae-wook, who has led the company’s autonomous driving initiatives, will also serve as CEO of the new unit and oversee the business directly, it said.
As part of the partnership, Krafton will make a 65 billion won strategic investment in Socar through a third-party allotment paid-in capital increase, Socar said. Krafton will become a major shareholder of Socar and will also make a separate investment in the new subsidiary as a core investor, the company said. Socar said it plans to participate in forming the new unit by contributing cash and data assets, pending board approval.
Socar said the project is being viewed as an unprecedented private-sector collaboration aimed at accelerating commercialization of autonomous driving services in South Korea, as well as one of the largest investments of its kind.
The company said it will concentrate 15 years of accumulated autonomous driving data and mobility platform operating capabilities into the new unit. It said that through its “Future Mobility TF,” launched earlier this year, it built a centralized data pipeline that collects real-time driving data based on its car-sharing fleet of about 25,000 vehicles, totaling about 1.1 million kilometers of real-world driving per day.
Socar said it has also secured a range of edge-case data, including about 220,000 accident records, and processed the data — including anonymization, time synchronization and tag labeling — into a format that can be used immediately for AI training. It said the work is helping speed efforts to commercialize autonomous driving services.
Socar said the new unit will pursue a phased commercialization strategy, starting with Level 2 car-sharing services and later expanding into fully autonomous, consumer-facing services such as Level 4 ride-hailing.
It said it will work to internalize technology while validating it in real-world services, build independent technical and operational capabilities, and pursue partnerships to compete in both domestic and global markets.
“Our goal goes beyond simply developing autonomous driving technology — it is to commercialize it successfully and fundamentally change how users move and their quality of life,” Park said. “Based on the data and operational know-how Socar has built over 15 years, we will create a new standard for the future mobility market.”
An industry official said Socar is effectively the only company with large-scale real-world driving data accumulated by everyday users. “This kind of data is a unique competitive advantage that cannot be built in a short period of time,” the official said.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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