NAVER Corporation
Market Data Current As Of: September 12, 2026
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NAVER Corporation
Compare market positioning with top industry peers
Explore NAVER
Core profile pages, annual revenue records, and related research hubs for this company.
Company History
Founded 1999 in Seongnam, South Korea
Naver began in 1997 as an in-house search-engine project inside Samsung SDS, led by engineer Lee Hae-jin, who saw that early global search engines handled the Korean language poorly. He spun the project out as an independent company in 1999, later merging with game company Hangame in 2000 to fund the fledgling search business, and built Naver into South Korea's dominant internet portal -- one of the few national markets where Google has never taken majority search share.
Lee Hae-jin spins the Naver search project out of Samsung SDS as an independent company targeting the Korean-language search market.
Naver launches Knowledge iN, an user-generated question-and-answer platform that becomes a major proprietary content and search-data source.
Naver's Japanese subsidiary launches the LINE messaging app in June 2011, developed partly in response to communication failures during the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and LINE goes on to dominate the Japanese messaging market.
Naver acquires Canadian storytelling platform Wattpad for about $600 million, combining it with its Webtoon digital-comics business.
Naver launches HyperCLOVA X, its Korean-language generative AI model, and completes its $1.2 billion acquisition of Poshmark to enter the US social-commerce market.
Naver announced in January 2021 that it would acquire Canadian storytelling platform Wattpad for about $600 million, combining Wattpad's large North American user-generated fiction community with Naver's existing Webtoon digital-comics business.
Naver agreed in October 2022 to acquire US social-commerce marketplace Poshmark for $17.90 per share in cash, an enterprise value of about $1.2 billion, completing the deal on January 5, 2023, to gain a foothold in the American secondhand and social-commerce apparel market.
Since its establishment in 1999, NAVER Corporation expanded from an early-stage venture into a recognized leader in Internet Search, Portal, Commerce, and Digital Content, overcoming key market challenges.
Over its history, NAVER Corporation executed decisive strategic pivots toward scalable monetization and digital distribution, securing its current market leadership.
By continually modernizing operations and embracing workflow automation, NAVER Corporation maintains resilience through changing technological and economic cycles.