Aju Business Daily

SEOUL -- The hotel chain of Lotte Group, the fifth-largest conglomerate in South Korea, has purchased a Seattle-based luxury hotel, for $175 million through a joint investment with a financial company based in Seoul. The acquisition came as the conglomerate stepped up efforts to realign its business structure after a business setback especially in China in 2018.

Hotel Lotte has formed a consortium with Hana Financial Investment to acquire The hotel at The Mark from Stockbridge, a private-equity real estate investment company based in San Francisco. The hotel in Seattle spans 189 guestrooms on 16 floors of F5 Tower with amenities including the First United Methodist Church. It will be run on consignment from June next year under the new name of Lotte Hotel Seattle.

The acquisition followed a strategic partnership agreement signed by Hotel Lotte and Hana Financial in September on expanding the business of the Lotte hotel chain which acquired the New York Palace Hotel, a luxury hotel in Manhattan, in 2015.

A purchase agreement was signed on December 24. "Through aggressive external expansion, we will solidify our position as a global hotel company representing South Korea," Hotel Lotte CEO Kim Hyun-sik said. Along with dozens of hotels, the hotel chain runs duty-free shops, theme parks, resorts and short-term lodging facilities.

In October 2017, group chairman Shin Dong-bin launched a holding company for the realignment of group structure. However, Lotte's realignment was delayed in February 2018 when the chairman was sentenced to two years and six months in prison on charges of bribing Choi Soon-sil, the crony of South Korea's ousted ex-president Park Geun-hye. The chairman was released in October 2018 after an appeals court suspended his sentence.

The group has invested an enormous amount of money in China. But it became the prime target of China's retaliatory onslaught for allowing US troops to set up a missile shield in its golf course in 2016. a prolonged consumer boycott led to the withdrawal of the group's troubled hypermarket chain in China.