Lotte Rental's Jeju Auto House on the southern resort island / Courtesy of Lotte Rental

By Kim Jae-heun

Lotte Group is speeding up its entry into the secondhand car market, as part of efforts to build up its mobility business ecosystem covering transportation, tourism and shopping services, the company said Monday.

Lotte Rental, a leading car rental agency in the country, will start selling used cars sometime between July and December this year, targeting general consumers. Lotte Rental seeks to secure a 10 percent market share for used cars by 2025, as it already maintains an infrastructure trading some 50,000 secondhand vehicles annually. It will soon open a used car dealership to provide test driving and maintenance services too.

Earlier this month, Lotte Rental invested 180 billion won ($148.1 million) into SoCar, becoming the third-largest shareholder in the car-sharing company. It already operates the country's No.2 car-sharing platform GreenCar. It also invested 25 billion won in 42dot, a local autonomous-driving startup, last August and it is collaborating with LG Energy Solution on secondary batteries.

"We have over 40 million users of L.POINT, whom we will entice to our super app mobility platform that connects our three main businesses of transportation, tourism and shopping," a Lotte Group official said.

L.POINT is Lotte's mobile payment system that can be used at its subsidiaries.

Mobility is one of the three main businesses that Lotte Group is adopting as a new growth engine along with bioscience and metaverse. Its chairman Shin Dong-bin ordered investments to create a new market with future-oriented business management at the company's Value Creation Meeting in January.

Lotte Holdings is establishing urban air mobility (UAM) infrastructure together with Lotte Rental. UAM is a transportation service using small aircraft such as flying cars, which can take off and land vertically without a runway. Last year, Lotte signed business partnerships with Skyworks Aeronautics and MOBIUS.energy to commercialize the transportation business by 2024.

Lotte also acquired the country's second-largest EV-charging company Joongang Control last year and obtained permission to temporarily operate autonomous shuttle buses without drivers for the first time in Korea.