TO SOUTH KOREANS Coupang is a household name. To people in America, where the e-commerce firm listed its shares in 2021, it is little known. And yet the Amazon of South Korea, with more than $35bn of sales and a workforce of about 100,000, has stumbled into an international dispute that is pitting Silicon Valley moguls, with the support of allies in the Trump administration, against the government of South Korea. It is a sobering illustration of how corporations are caught up in the politicisation of global trade.
