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Choi Soo-yeon has led Naver through crisis and maintained its search-engine lead over Google. Now she’s aiming to outmaneuver the giants again in AI.
INTERNET FIRM NAVER has earned its nickname—Korea’s Google—by pulling off an improbable feat: It dominates South Korea’s search market, having defended its turf from Google, the world’s top search engine, whose revenue is 40 times as large as Naver’s.
As of September 2023, Naver controlled 59% of Korea’s search market to Google’s 31%.
Naver is perhaps “the only company in the world that has survived competition against Google and Amazon,” says Choi Soo-yeon, Naver’s CEO since 2022.
Naver is hardly a household name outside Korea. But it operates a sprawling portfolio that pits the $22-billion-inmarket-cap firm against other Big Tech giants on multiple fronts.
It has a controlling stake in both Yahoo Japan—the most popular website in Japan, according to Nielsen—and the Japanese messaging app Line—a WhatsApp rival— through a joint venture with SoftBank.
It runs Korea’s No. 2 e-commerce service, behind Coupang. (Amazon’s platform ranks fourth.) Naver’s $1.2 billion purchase last year of Poshmark, the U.S.- based clothing-resale site, expanded its retail reach.
In the streaming wars era, Naver has amassed content platforms of its own. It owns Webtoon, which hosts mobilefriendly comic strips that are popular across Asia. (Naver is reportedly planning a U.S. IPO for Webtoon later this year.) Naver bought Wattpad, a Canada-based platform for user-submitted fiction, for $600 million in 2021.
Naver also has a small but growing cloudcomputing business—a category in which Amazon, Google, and Microsoft reign supreme—and it’s launched a series of AI projects to contend with the release of OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT. In recent quarters,
Naver’s many business lines have notched record revenues and operating profits, but Choi sees Naver’s mission as extending beyond its own bottom line.
Despite Naver’s small size, she casts the firm as a counterpoint in a global tech scene in which power is concentrated among a gargantuan few.
“It’s becoming a world where there are only one or two search companies and one or two commerce companies,” Choi said in a recent wide-ranging interview—her first with the international press— at Naver headquarters in Seongnam, just outside Seoul. (Choi gave her answers in Korean, which were later translated into English.) Naver “is a compan
