Humax Mobility: How a consumer electronics company expanded into mobility

How helpful do you find the notion of ‘category’ or ‘industry’ when you think about Humax Mobility’s evolving competitive environment?

Humax Mobility is the next core business target of Humax Group.

Humax Mobility sounds like a business in the mobility category, but connection is the core purpose of our business. We intend to underpin our businesses to mobility, connect people and goods and expand our business operations into lifestyle.

The boundaries of our business are fluid. Therefore, we invested in ‘Lounge X’ showcasing the application of food technology robotics and invested in a boutique hotel development projecting which expanded beyond mobility services. We are expanding the scale of investment and the scope of the business area. We are constantly considering how to make a cohesive connection between everything – not just mobility but all the services related to lifestyle – and provide this to customers.

Over the last 20 years connection has redefined business and consumer expectation, driving new requirements around relevance – from Web 1 to Web 2 and now to Web 3. How can brands stay ahead in a Web 3.0 “connection economy”?

Humax began as a broadcasting and telecommunication device business. Those formative experiences with technology allowed us to expand and connect to other relevant businesses, and Humax Mobility is one of these outcomes. While we used to focus on hardware, our focus is now on software solution and services.

A car sharing service is one of the services underpinned by Humax Mobility, and the idea arose from my own experience as a consumer. The concept of the service is to facilitate consumer car- sharing in busy communities where they live or work. For example, if someone just chooses their favorite car on the app, then the selected car is instantly available at the parking lot where he lives or works. At that time, I realized that sharing a car was shared ownership. This reflects a wider paradigm shift from a possession-based economy to a sharing economy. Our company ensured that this system could create new value for customers and started to acquire relevant enterprises one by one to contribute to the growth of Humax Mobility. With this community car sharing service, consumers can form deeper connections with each other even if they have already connected once before. We leverage previous stable and reliable connections to create new relationships to share value.

More important is that Web 3.0 is viewed as ‘the era of open source’, or ‘the era of community for value sharing’ which aims for an open environment and to enable infinite connections among participants. For that reason, Humax Mobility also plans to enable infinite connections by acquiring and investing in numerous companies in diverse areas.

What moves have you made, (or planned or observed) that have enabled Humax Mobility to transcend its original category and drive relevance and growth in new areas? What’s the secret to success here?

Humax is inventing “Proximity as a Service” platform in our society or system. Let us say that I need to purchase something in the nearest store, but it is heavy enough to be delivered, so I require delivery. Even if the store is located so close to my house, during current delivery process, the items are sent to the hub terminal which is days away to be delivered. To resolve this, Humax is transforming Hi-Parking – a major company with 600 city parking hubs in automated parking management acquired in 2019 — into a logistics network hub, ensuring that logistics is dramatically improved from days to a few hours.

We can see that Humax Mobility has built its success by operating at the fringes of the Move Arena and Connect Arenas. We have questioned our levels of practical connection and how we maintain them. We are installing charging stations in parking spaces for EV users to charge their cars within a few minutes everywhere in Seoul, Once this service is connected, customers will not need 30 minutes to find the nearest charging station. It means that they would not have to waste a couple of hours until recharging is completed because technically, they are just parking nearest, not charging. This is one of the strong examples to create consumer experiences by using a connection to our existing infrastructure with a new service concept.

We have more and more sophisticated ways to connect to others and the world around us. What do you believe makes a rewarding or meaningful connection for consumers? And what do brands need to know about people as they think about how to connect us?

First, we always consider increasing consumers convenience. When we see the world’s super-apps, they all provide multiple services across one platform. Grab is one of the famous examples, this app influences the lifestyle of consumers a lot. In Korea, Yanolja – which started as an accommodation booking service – has evolved rapidly into a super-app, with offerings including a prominent, inclusive tour service.

Humax Mobility is not only creating a super-app in mobility. In line with our hope to contribute to lifestyle, our super-app will be an inclusive service provider which increases the added value of a single building unit. That why we are establishing infrastructure including kitchen sharing, robot café, property technology, lifestyle-oriented insurance services and so on. We are building consumers’ convenience, and we are providing a totally new level of experience.

How can brands that facilitate connection avoid the pitfalls of becoming utilities – only noticed when things go wrong?

I think we need to avoid imitation at the expense of innovation. If brands want to create meaningful connection, then new experiences are paramount for customers. It could be the content of the service or the price of items. Even if the area is unavailable to provide new types of services anymore, then disrupting prices could attract customers.

Humax Mobility is expanding its presence in the virtual world. How are you creating and delivering immersive brand experiences to fulfil the human need to connect? What’s next at ?

To make the Humax Mobility brand stand out in the Connect Arena, we always want to provide a new experience for customers. We are not satisfied just to build infrastructure, but we want to integrate and connect them to create new value. That is the growth engine we have dreamt of.

In the mobility area, in a service segment including charging, car sharing, and parking, the supply densities needs to be higher in the Korean market. As a result, Humax is focused on using parking lots to build service businesses for customers’ convenience. We are enabling a fast-charging system, providing cleaned cars wherever on request, and creating a car parking space booking service to avoid spending time and effort to find a parking space. Moreover, we are trying other diverse projects in this Connect Arena based on the connectivity of technology, such as Lounge X Café (an automated café system) for increasing productivity and entertaining customers at the same time.

Looking at the 4 capabilities we think are critical for success in the Connect Arena (content, devices, interfaces, infrastructure), how would you describe your contribution to each? Are some more important than others and why?

All the factors including content, devices, interfaces, and infrastructure are important. Overall, I cannot say that some are more or less important than the others because the key is to provide a cohesive experience to customers. That is the motto of Humax Mobility: to provide a cohesive experience to our customers with diverse approaches by enabling connections between people and things.

What are the insights you’re seeing that are driving people’s behavior in this arena today?

Innovation. People are attracted to innovation, and they want to use goods or services of innovative companies or brands. Personally, I am quite inspired by Tesla.

They do almost everything in the vertical including H/W (even chipset), S/W, charging solution, insurance, in car services etc. so they can integrate all the vertical services and products all of which EV customer needs. These are all innovative ideas. Innovation can come in the form of a certain type of unexpected experience or generous discount.

Humax Mobility is acquiring, inventing and integrating all the key mobility services , core HW&SW solutions and key infrastructures to give innovative experience to customer. I think these innovative approaches are likely to attract people to choose Humax Mobility.