Naver Corporation
Naver Corporation is a South Korean internet conglomerate headquartered in Seongnam that operates the search engine Naver. Naver established itself as an early pioneer in the use of user-generated content through the creation of the online Q&A platform Knowledge iN.
On August 1, 2013, Naver decided to split with Hangame, a corporation with which it had grown together with as NHN Corporation for 13 years. On October 1, 2013, the company adopted its current name, Naver Corporation, in order to reflect the change, thus restoring its pre-merger name. Hangame is now overseen by NHN Entertainment Corporation. Naver's current affiliates include Snow, Naver Labs, Naver Webtoon, NAVER Cloud, and Works Mobile.
History
1999–2000: Establishment and launch of services
Naver Corporation was founded by Lee Hae-jin in 1999. Naver Corporation was first established in June 1999 under the name of Naver Comm. Along with its search engine Naver, the company also launched a service for children named Junior Naver. In July 2000, Naver merged with Hangame Communications Inc. and several other companies including Oneque and Search Solutions.In August 2000, Naver began its 'comprehensive search' service, which allows users to get a variety of results from a search query on a single page, organized by type.
2001–2012: Renaming and worldwide expansion
In 2001, NAVER Comm was renamed NHN Corporation, although both divisions—Naver and Hangame—continued to operate under their original brand names. NHN also stood for.In 2002, NHN was registered on the KOSDAQ stock exchange, and launched the online Q&A service Naver Knowledge iN. In 2003, NHN merged all Japanese subsidiaries into NHN Japan. In 2005, Naver began the online donation service: Happy Bean. It also established its US branch under the name NHN USA. In 2007, it launched Naver Japan in order to pursue its search engine business in Japan. Meanwhile, NHN USA officially opened its American game service, ijji. However, it later sold away its 100% stake to Aeria Games.
In 2008, NHN appeared on the Forbes Global 2000 list for the first time. That same year, NHN had the largest market capitalization among KOSDAQ-listed companies before being transferred to the KOSPI market in November. In 2009, Kim Sang-Hun of NHN and Jing-Wan Kim of Samsung were the only South Korean CEOs to appear on Forbes' Asia's Fab 50 list.
In 2010, The company moved into its new headquarters now known as the Green Factory.
In June 2011, NHN Japan launched Line, a messaging application that quickly soared in usage. In the same year, NHN Japan, Naver Japan and Livedoor were all merged into one company: NHN Japan. In August, NHN also established its Singapore branch NHN Singapore.
2013–2015: Splitting from NHN
In 2013, NHN launched its subsidiary companies Camp Mobile and Line Plus. NHN was split into Naver Corporation and NHN Entertainment, the latter being formerly known as Hangame. Similarly, NHN Japan separated into Line Corporation and Hangame Japan. In June, Naver became the first web company in Korea to build and operate its own data center, Data Center GAK, which was built in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province.In 2015, Naver launched Works Mobile for B2B collaboration businesses and merged with Entry Education Labs, which is a software education platform company.
2016–2020: Listing and further expansion
Naver's annual revenue for 2016 was 4.02 trillion won. In 2016, Line Corporation was double listed on both the NYSE and the TSE. In August 2016, Naver spun off its app SNOW into a separate subsidiary company, Snow Corp. Naver also began Project Flower, a project which aims to support small businesses and creators by cooperating with them on various projects. In September 2016, Naver and its affiliate Line announced that they would invest a combined 100 million euros into K-Fund 1. K-Fund 1 is a European startup accelerator fund operated by Korelya Capital, which is an investment firm established by Fleur Pellerin, the Korean-born former French minister overseeing small and medium enterprises in the digital economy.In 2017, Naver established its subsidiary companies Snow, Naver Labs, and Naver Webtoon. Naver opened Space Green, which is a startup space inside Station F, a startup incubator space located in France. Naver also acquired Xerox Research Centre Europe, located in the French city Grenoble, rebranding it as Naver Labs Europe.
In 2018, Naver launched Naver Z Corp, a division that focuses on the Metaverse. Naver Z also launched the online game platform Zepeto the same year.
2021–present: Global expansion
In mid-January 2021, Naver announced the acquisition of Wattpad for US$600 million.In March 2021 Line Corporation merged with Yahoo Japan, which has been operated by Z Holdings, a SoftBank Group subsidiary. Under the new structure, Naver and SoftBank Corp., which is the wireless carrier unit of SoftBank Group, each hold 50 percent stakes in a new company named A Holdings Corp., which holds a majority stake in Z Holdings, which will operate Line and Yahoo Japan. Upon integrating the two businesses and creating further platforms, the merged company aims to compete with the U.S. tech giants Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple and the Chinese tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. The merger also gives Z Holdings three additional Asian markets where Line is popular: Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
In May 2021, Naver partnered with CJ Group’s CJ ENM to acquire Munpia Inc, the third largest web-novel platform in Korea.
In October 2022, Naver agreed to buy social commerce marketplace Poshmark for a total enterprise value of US$1.2billion, which finalized in January 2023.
Products and services
Based on the influence of its core search engine service, Naver has also developed new business models in online advertisement, content, and deep-tech through research and development.Search engine
Naver was the first Korean web provider to develop its own search engine. It was also the first operator to introduce the comprehensive search service. The search engine has since grown to offer a variety of related services including e-mail, mapping, e-commerce, social media, wireless payments, and online streaming.Junior Naver
Junior Naver, also known as Juniver, is a children's search service that began in 1999. Junior Naver provides various services for children of each age range, such as Pororo Play Time, Pany's Room, Children's song world, and Children's story world—as well as a Disney Zone for Disney Channel shows and animations. The application and the mobile version were each launched in 2011 and 2012 in order to provide contents in streaming form rather than having to download them. Junior Naver also operates a parental monitoring system that blocks harmful or inappropriate information. Meanwhile, Junior Naver's "Gameland" service was officially terminated in February 2019.The service is scheduled to end on May 27, 2025.
Knowledge iN
In 2002, Naver set up one of the first Q&A webpages, Knowledge iN. The service allows users to post questions on any subject, and select from answers submitted by other users, points are awarded to users with the most helpful answers.Knowledge iN also offers an Open Dictionary function, which is a database of informative articles generated by users. Users can create an article on their own, or enable other users to collaborate by creating a thread of articles on the same subject. There is also an 'Ask an Expert' category where licensed doctors, veterinarians, pharmacists, lawyers, tax accountants, and labor attorneys answer users' questions. As of May 2016, Knowledge iN had 100 million questions, 200 million answers.
Cafe and Blog
Naver Cafe and Blog are user-generated content platforms where users post specialized contents on various themes. Cafe allows users to create communities on various topics, and Blog gives any user the chance to manage their own personal blog. There were 10.5 million Naver Cafes running in May 2017, making Naver the most visited Cafe platform in the country. 800,000 new contents are generated every day in 23 million Blogs and 10 million Cafes.Dictionary and Encyclopedia
Naver Dictionary supports 34 categories, including English, Korean, Chinese, Chinese characters, Japanese, Global Communication, Vietnamese, Uzbek, Indonesian, Thai, Arabic, Khmer, Tamil, Mongolian, Hindi, Persian, Nepali, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Turkish, Georgian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech as of May 30, 2017. It has the most languages among Korean dictionaries. Handwriting recognition is supported in Japanese and Chinese characters. Naver is also investing 10 billion won for the development of language dictionaries for five years beginning from 2016.Naver Encyclopedia functions consist of a professional database with over 3 million entries from many different encyclopedias.