If you don't give me a trade secret, "Block the call"...Kakao is fined 72.4 billion won and prosecuted by prosecutors.

Kakao Enter Affiliate Taxi Business With 93% Share in 2019
Requires competitors to enter into a real-time trade secret agreement
Article information, driving information, etc.Competitive strategy available
Kakao Blocks Call to Competitor-Franchised Taxis Who Rejected Contracts

[Anchor]
Kakao Mobility, which was fined 25 billion won last year for driving calls to its affiliated taxis, will pay more than 70 billion won for demanding a contract to provide trade secrets to other companies and blocking calls if they refuse.

Five years into Kakao's taxi franchise business, there is virtually only one competitor left.

Lee Seung-eun reports.

[Reporter]
Kakao Mobility, which started its general call service in 2015, entered the franchise business that provides exclusive calls to taxis contracted with it in 2019 when it had a 93% market share.

Competitors were asked to sign contracts to provide real-time driver information and driving information for reasons such as passenger brand confusion.

Providing such information, which is a trade secret, will allow you to analyze areas or time zones where there are many taxi operations and create competitive strategies.

When the competitor refused to sign the contract, Kakao blocked general calls to the competitor's affiliate drivers.

[Taxi Driver/Join Kakao Mobility Competitive Affiliate Business: One day, Kakao App suddenly died. I can't take the call. I made an average sales of 5 million won a month. But Cole died, so it was only about 200 to 250.]

Competitors were forced to sign contracts with Kakao after a series of cancellations of Kakao's general calls, but normal competition was impossible.

As a result of blocking calls and driving calls that were previously sanctioned by the Fair Trade Commission, Kakao's share in the merchant market rose to 79%, and its share in the general call market also rose to 96%.

In the meantime, Kakao has only one competitor left in the taxi franchise market, where about 10 operators have been licensed.

The Fair Trade Commission has decided to temporarily impose a fine of 72.4 billion won on Kakao along with a corrective order and file a complaint with the prosecution.

[Han Ki-jung / Fair Trade Commission Chairman: This is a case in which a huge platform monopolizing the market unfairly uses its market power to restrict fair competition with competitors in adjacent markets, thereby strictly sanctioning anti-competitive behavior.]

Kakao Mobility said the contract in question was made on the premise of providing mutual information to resolve user inconvenience and that it would file an administrative lawsuit against the company for not using the information it secured for its business.

I'm YTN's Lee Seung Eun.

Video editing: Jung Kook-yoon