Did you know that Google isn’t the top search engine in South Korea? It’s not even a close second.
Most Koreans actually prefer Naver for various reasons, and they like it so much that the search engine holds about 56% of the market, per Statista. Google is catching up, but it currently only has about a 35% share, and it’ll likely be a while before it can close the gap.
Naver’s other offerings are also received quite well in the country, including its e-commerce platform, messaging, payments, storytelling, digital comics (webtoons), metaverse efforts, a selfie app, games, the cloud and more.
But like any true tech company, Naver was never satisfied with its success at home. The company quickly expanded to Japan, and more widely in Southeast Asia. But instead of leading with its core search engine and e-commerce businesses, it instead opted for different strategies in each new country, such as expanding in Japan with its Line messaging app and increasing its footprint in Southeast Asia with its 3D avatar app, Zepeto, and other offerings.
It’s now expanding its e-commerce business — wildly successful in South Korea with 18% of the market — with a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace model that it aims to offer in North America, Europe and Asia. Unlike many B2C marketplaces, which usually sell large quantities of a few profitable, popular items, Naver’s e-commerce strategy is focusing on long-tail business, allowing sellers to sell small quantities of hard-to-find items to buyers looking for niche products.
It wants to add a social network feature, which allows sellers to receive comments, likes and users in its e-commerce unit. To that end, the company earlier this month said it would buy Redwood, California-based social commerce marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion.
