search services

Born in 1999, Naver Corporation is a South Korean company that started offering search services at the beginning of the 21st century. Naver’s headquarters is based in Seongnam, South Korea. The company is known for pioneering in user-generated content in its early days and it has several other services (encyclopedia, cafe, blog, etc). It also has several subsidiaries that include Line, Snow, Camp Mobile, Naver Labs, etc. The company is also trying to evolve its technology platform and hence closely cooperating with tech startups. Naver was also recognized by Forbes as one of the most innovative companies in the world and was also featured in Fortune magazine.

About Naver Corporation

NAVER is the top search portal in South Korea and the company’s other subsidiaries and affiliates offer services like digital comic platforms, messenger, social media platforms, metaverse platforms, etc. Naver has also expanded to the international markets in the last two decades. It has offices in Japan, the USA, France, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and Taiwan. There are nearly 3,000 employees in the company and its current CEO is Choi Soo Yeon. Naver was originally founded by Lee Hae Jin under the name of Naver Comm. It has made several acquisitions in the past decade and merged with many companies to expand its territory.

History

In June 1999, Lee Hae Jin established Naver Comm. and its main product was the search engine, Naver. Since Naver was a search portal the company decided to roll out a similar search engine for the children and hence named it Junior Naver. After a year, the company merged with Hangame Communications Inc, Search Solutions, Oneque, and several other companies. In August 2000, Naver decided to roll out its comprehensive search product that allowed users to get a variety of search results from a single query on a single page. And the search results were organized by types like blogs, products, images, etc. In the same year, the company also established Hangame Japan.

Entering a new decade, the company changed its name to NHN (Next Human Network) Corporation. But the two divisions of the company, Naver and Hangame continued operating under their original brand names. In 2002, Naver became a public company and also launched a new service, Naver Knowledge iN. It also began a donation service called Happy Bean. It was in 2003 that the company merged all of its Japanese subsidiaries into NHN Japan and after a few years launched Naver Japan to start its search engine in the country. Eventually, the company also expanded to the USA and opened the American game service, ijji but sold it away shortly.

In 2008, it was for the first time that the company’s name was featured in Forbes magazine and after a year the CEO of NHN was also featured in Forbes’ Asia’s Fab 50 list. In the next few years, Naver focuses on strengthening the social media business as it acquired a Japanese blog platform, Livedoor, and also launched Line, a messaging application. In 2013, NHN was split into two divisions, Naver Corporation and NHN Entertainment and in the same year, Naver became the first company to operate its own data center. By the end of 2015, the company’s global revenue started exceeding rapidly especially because of the global affiliate services.

Global Expansion

As the company’s annual revenue started exceeding 4 trillion won, many of its affiliates also started filing IPO and going public. The number of subsidiaries of the company also started increasing and some of the new ones include Snow, Naver Labs, and Naver Webtoon. In 2021, Naver acquired Wattpad for $600 million. Line Corporation, the biggest subsidiary of Naver merged with Yahoo Japan in 2021. Naver’s current focus is to start competing with the biggest tech giants of the world like Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

About the Founder

Famous as the founder of Naver Corporation, Lee Hae-jin is a 54-year old billionaire. He is one of the top twenty richest people in South Korea and his business venture started while he was already working for Samsung in the late 1990s. Lee went to Seoul National University followed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.