South Korea’s leading car rental service provider Lotte Rental Co. recorded the best-ever six-month earnings in the first half of this year thanks to the impressive performance of its car-renting business Lotte Rent-a-car.

Lotte Rental announced in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that it posted a consolidated net profit of 20.4 billion won ($18.6 million), up 246 percent on year, during the January to June period this year. The operating profit surged 76.3 percent on year to 57.5 billion won and sales also jumped 22.9 percent on year to 744.7 billion won over the cited period. Its operating profit margin rose 2.3 percent in the first half to 7.7 percent from the same period last year’s 5.4 percent.

The strong performance is largely attributed to its booming car-renting business. Lotte Rent-a-car overtook Japan’s Toyota Rent A Car to become the Asia’s top car rental company late last year with its number of registered cars surpassing 137,000 units. In addition, the rapidly growing B2C (Business to Consumer) rental market, overseas business expansion and rising demand for its car-sharing service Green Car have all aided the company.

The most outstanding and popular service of the Asia’s biggest and world’s sixth biggest car rental firm by the number of registered cars is its data logging service for company cars. Since April this year, a company car owner must submit a record about the car’s whereabouts to prove the car has been used for business purposes to receive tax deduction benefits. Lotte Rent-a-car users can conveniently log the data through online and mobile application.

The company expects that it would see its sales exceed 1.5 trillion won this year.

It plans to bolster its rental business for other items such as ICT equipments or devices other than cars as it sees that the demand for automobiles would decrease sharply in the future. It is considering communication equipments or solutions rental service for companies and smartphones and laptop computers rental business for students.

By Park Chang-young

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]