Amidst the Tailwind of Skyrocketing Gold Prices, 'Geumbang' Innovates the Traditional Market and Writes a Myth of 832.8 Billion Won in Sales

2025 Gold Price Trends, Industry Tailwinds, and Key Points to Watch

It is no exaggeration to say that 2025 was truly the 'Year of Gold.' As rising geopolitical tensions, massive expansions in gold purchases by central banks of major countries, and a global de-dollarization trend intertwined, international gold prices broke all-time highs day after day. In fact, throughout 2025, gold futures prices showed a record-breaking surge of about 64%, surpassing $4,600 per ounce for the first time in history.

This macroeconomic rise in gold prices has breathed a strong tailwind into the entire precious metals and gold-related industry. A favorable business environment was created, with the asset values of gold-handling companies rising and transaction volumes expanding. Looking ahead, as gold-related companies begin to announce their 2025 earnings in earnest, comparing their performances cross-sectionally will be an important point to watch. This is because it will allow us to clearly distinguish between companies that simply rode the macroeconomic boom and those that practically absorbed market share based on an unrivaled business model.

(Source: Upstore App Page)

The Painful Experience of CEO Lim Jin-ri, a 'Gold Shop Daughter,' Breaks 60 Years of Jongno Custom

Amidst this massive industry boom, the company that showed the most overwhelming performance is undoubtedly 'Geumbang', a startup that operates the B2B precious metals trading platform 'Upstore'. Behind their success lies CEO Lim Jin-ri's unique startup story and deep understanding of the market.

CEO Lim Jin-ri is a 'gold shop daughter' who grew up under parents running a gold shop in Jongno, Seoul, the mecca of domestic precious metals. The precious metals market she witnessed while helping her parents during her college years was the epitome of inefficiency. Due to the so-called 'settlement gold' practice where physical gold was cut and paid instead of cash during transactions between wholesalers/retailers and factories, they had to cut gold with cutters every time to match the weight to 0.01g, and gold was sometimes lost in this process. Running errands with heavy gold lumps and bundles of cash often resulted in scoldings from her parents because the receipts and the weight of the remaining gold did not match.

Harboring the fundamental question, "Money is easily transferred via mobile, so why can't gold be the same?", CEO Lim set aside her major in biotechnology, taught herself coding, and founded the startup 'Geumbang' in 2019. In 2020, she released 'Upstore', an app that records settlement gold in a mobile digital ledger and allows withdrawal only when necessary, but persuading Jongno merchants who had been accustomed to face-to-face transactions for decades was not an easy task. In response, CEO Lim personally ran around to about 12,000 gold shops nationwide to make sales, and succeeded in drawing merchants to the platform by providing digital gold while drastically lowering the commission margin to 0.05%.

A Phenomenal Earnings Explosion Hard to Find in the Traditional Industry Startup Ecosystem

Opening its eyes to the convenience and transparency of digital gold wallets, the precious metals market quickly integrated into Upstore. Starting with a meager 13 million won in sales in 2019, its first year of establishment, Geumbang settled into the market by recording 17.5 billion won in sales in 2021. Subsequently, in 2022, it surpassed 135.8 billion won in sales and successfully turned a profit with an operating profit of 80 million won, entering an explosive growth trajectory.

The momentum did not stop; it achieved 372.2 billion won in sales and 2.7 billion won in operating profit in 2024, and finally, in 2025, it performed the remarkable feat of recording a whopping 832.8 billion won in sales and 13.5 billion won in operating profit.

This is a performance that cannot be explained simply by the external factor of rising gold prices. The case of a startup formalizing the system in a conservative traditional precious metals market—which had been dominated by handwritten ledgers, analog methods, and shadowy cash transactions for decades—and explosively growing both sales and profits in such a short period is considered a very rare case across the entire startup ecosystem. In particular, while there are places that have grown in size by receiving astronomical investment amounts from VCs and the like, the fact that 'Geumbang' has grown so explosively despite its external investment attraction amounting to only about 2 billion won is worthy of even higher praise in terms of its inner substance and self-sustainability.

Mining the Gold Mine in Closets and Going Global, the Reason Why Future Developments are Closely Watched

The innovation of 'Geumbang' does not stay in the B2B market. While the Bank of Korea currently holds about 104 tons of gold, it is estimated that the gold (old gold) sleeping in the closets of domestic individuals amounts to about 700 to 800 tons (about 15 trillion won in scale). Geumbang plans to formalize this massive potential market through 'Gold Popcorn,' a B2C/C2C platform that borrows secondhand trading methods to solve VAT issues while allowing transparent direct trading of gold between individuals and crafting it into new products, and is also expected to actively utilize the global expansion card. Attention is focused on what massive footprints 'Geumbang,' with 1 trillion won in sales right before its eyes, will leave in the future.