Naver aims to attract 1 bn users via active M&As by 2027

Naver Corp. vows to attract 1 billion users around the world and generate 15 trillion won ($12.2 billion) in five years. 

Only FAANG companies boast such massive userbases at present. The acronym refers to Facebook (part of Meta Platforms, Inc.), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google (part of Alphabet Inc.). 

The tech juggernaut currently has some 700 million monthly active users and generated 6.8 trillion won in revenue last year. 

The conglomerate held the Naver Meetup press conference on Wednesday at its second office building named 1784. The tech giant's two leaders shared where the internet company is headed for what it calls Naver 3.0. 

Naver entered a new chapter a month ago with the appointment of Choi Soo-yeon at its annual general meeting. Choi is the 22-year-old company’s first millennial and female leader. 

“Naver 1.0 was about repeated challenges for 10 years since its inception and creating the success story of the Line messenger, which took the company to the global arena,” Choi said in her opening remarks.

The chief executive added the company has now closed the chapter on Naver 2.0. She explained the second phase was all about adding global partnerships and subsidiaries under its umbrella. 

During that phase, Naver grew a number of verticals in overseas markets, such as image messaging app Snow; metaverse platform Zepeto; and digital comics provider Webtoon, to name a few. 

In neighboring Japan, there is Z Holdings Corp., which is owned by A Holdings. SoftBank Group and Naver jointly control A Holdings.

Z Holdings owns Yahoo! Japan, Japan's largest portal website; Line, Japan's largest messaging app; and others. 

In North America, Naver acquired the world’s largest web novel platform Wattpad Corp. in Toronto and established Naver Labs Europe after acquiring a local artificial intelligence research center.

NAVER 3.0

The attorney-turned-CEO said Naver 3.0 is going to be a combination of portfolio diversification, technological leadership, and synergy effect from partnerships. 

“Instead of existing as a single enterprise, Team Naver is going to grow on the back of collaboration among different businesses and partners,” Choi explained. 

Naver’s CFO Kim Nam-sun is also confident about the company’s robust growth. 

“Naver is already enjoying worldwide growth in multiple verticals; namely search engines, e-commerce, entertainment, fintech, cloud, and robotics,” the Morgan Stanley alum said. 

Kim stressed that judging by each businesses’ competitiveness and value, Team Naver has “tremendous upward momentum” and will seek localized growth models in Japan, North America, and Europe.

All verticals under the parent company will be present in Japan this year. 

Z Holdings will incorporate projects that have been successful in South Korea into Japan’s ecosystem of small- and medium-sized enterprises. Naver will also give a boost to the B2B services already present in the archipelago such as Line Works, Naver Cloud, and Naver Clova. 

Content platforms will get the biggest push in North America where webtoons are showing exponential growth. 

The 44-year-old CFO moved to Naver in August 2020 and the purchase of Wattpad was one of the high-profile overseas investments he led. Kim will strive to expand the conglomerate’s intellectual property titles in the content industry beyond webtoons.

Weverse, a global fandom platform, will broaden its services with a focus on the US market. It is collaborating with Hybe Co., a K-pop record label and talent agency best known for BTS. 

The focus in Europe will be on strengthening its artificial intelligence competitiveness. 

Naver Labs Europe boasts cutting-edge technology in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP). Computer Vision is an interdisciplinary field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos while NLP is programming computers to process and analyze large amounts of human language data.

COMMUNITY-DRIVEN

The 41-year-old leader said that “community” services are the foundation stones of Naver and thus will be at the core of its metaverse businesses.

Naver is best known for its search engine services, which Koreans affectionately call the “green window,” maps and blogs. 

“We have been consistent in launching new community-driven services such as Cafe, Band, and V Live,” Choi said. She added the company has a deep and wide knowledge of such services that will work to its advantage in leading in the metaverse as a community industry.

Naver plans to showcase a community-style metaverse platform in its sports service in the latter half of this year and is slated to offer similar platforms in the webtoon and entertainment areas. 

Last month, Naver Z announced the number of subscribers to its metaverse platform Zepeto now exceeds 300 million. 

The number of Zepeto's monthly active users (MAU) stands at 20 million. Ninety-five percent of the users are based abroad.

Choi made headlines across South Korea when she was tapped to lead the top online platform late last year with local media saying it was Naver's most dramatic top management reshuffle ever. 

During Wednesday’s press event, the millennial chief executive said she will work as a pivotal point that connects different arms of Team Naver as opposed to ruling at the top. 

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at leeswoo@hankyung.com
Jee Abbey Lee edited this article.