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.
Naver is perhaps “the only company NAVER CEO
