Do you know that Google isn’t the highest search engine in South Korea? It’s not even a detailed second.
Most Koreans really favor Naver for numerous causes, they usually prefer it a lot that the search engine holds about 56% of the market, per Statista. Google is catching up, but it surely presently solely has a couple of 35% share, and it’ll seemingly be some time earlier than it may shut the hole.
Naver’s different choices are additionally obtained fairly properly within the nation, together with its e-commerce platform, messaging, payments, storytelling, digital comics (webtoons), metaverse efforts, a selfie app, games, the cloud and extra.
However like several true tech firm, Naver was by no means glad with its success at residence. The corporate shortly expanded to Japan, and extra extensively in Southeast Asia. However as a substitute of main with its core search engine and e-commerce companies, it as a substitute opted for various methods in every new nation, comparable to increasing in Japan with its Line messaging app and rising its footprint in Southeast Asia with its 3D avatar app, Zepeto, and different choices.
It’s now increasing its e-commerce enterprise — wildly profitable in South Korea with 18% of the market — with a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market mannequin that it goals to supply in North America, Europe and Asia. Not like many B2C marketplaces, which often promote giant portions of some worthwhile, fashionable objects, Naver’s e-commerce technique is specializing in long-tail enterprise, permitting sellers to promote small portions of hard-to-find objects to patrons searching for area of interest merchandise.
It desires so as to add a social community function, which permits sellers to obtain feedback, likes and customers in its e-commerce unit. To that finish, the corporate earlier this month said it would buy Redwood, California-based social commerce marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion.
