Choi Su-yeon "Naver Global 3.0 Era... 1 Billion Users and 15 Trillion KRW Revenue Within 5 Years"

First Official Appearance After Taking Office
Bundang Second Office Building '1784' Unveiled

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Choi Soo-yeon, CEO of Naver, declared the beginning of Naver’s ‘Global 3.0’ era. She also announced plans to secure 1 billion global users within five years and achieve sales of 15 trillion won. Currently, Naver has 700 million global users, and its sales reached 6.8 trillion won last year.

On the 13th, Naver held the ‘Naver Meetup’ event at its second headquarters ‘1784’ located in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, where it revealed its future vision and management goals.

At her first official public appearance since taking office, CEO Choi said, “Naver has grown through the global 1.0 phase, which created a successful case with LINE on the global stage after more than ten years of challenges since its founding. Then, it passed through the global 2.0 phase by adding global portfolios one by one and building a foundation for new challenges. Going forward, through a diverse business portfolio, technological leadership, and collaboration with domestic and international partners, ‘Team Naver’ will lead growth and transform into a global company.”

Lee Hae-jin (1.0) → Han Seong-sook (2.0) → Choi Soo-yeon (3.0)

CEO Choi emphasized that Naver will introduce independent business models optimized for Japan, North America, and Europe. In Japan, Naver plans to showcase all its business areas. The project ‘Kkot’ (Flower), which helped build the business ecosystem for domestic small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), will be developed together with Japanese partner Z Holdings. Efforts will also focus on expanding B2B businesses and foundational technologies such as LINE WORKS, Cloud, and CLOVA.

In the North American market, Naver will strengthen its content business by expanding the webtoon intellectual property (IP) value chain in collaboration with Wattpad. CEO Choi stated, “We plan to actively support mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to expand global partnerships.” The global fandom platform ‘Weverse,’ which collaborates with HYBE, will also expand its services centered in the United States this year.

In the European market, cooperation with global big tech companies will be strengthened. Naver Labs Europe will enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) technology competitiveness and apply its know-how in building SME ecosystems and content IP value chains to the European content business sector. Former CEO Han Seong-sook, appointed as head of European business development, is expected to lead these efforts.

The World’s First Robot-Friendly Building ‘1784’

On this day, CEO Choi also previewed vertical metaverse areas.

CEO Choi said, “Team Naver is already far ahead in the metaverse topic with Zepeto and Arcverse, and Naver’s ‘community’ services, which have maintained competitiveness since the early days of the business, are the essence of the metaverse. We continue to introduce representative community services such as Cafe, Band, and V LIVE, and we understand them most deeply and broadly,” expressing confidence in community-type metaverse.

This year, Naver plans to start by integrating community-type metaverse into its sports services in the second half of the year and will later introduce vertical metaverses in the webtoon and entertainment fields.

Additionally, Naver unveiled its second headquarters, 1784, on this day. The second headquarters gained attention by receiving the world’s first robot-friendly building certification from the Smart City Association. The project name ‘1784’ was inspired by the address (178-4) and the year 1784, when the Industrial Revolution began.

1784 is the world’s first robot-friendly building and a ‘tech convergence building’ where various technologies developed by Naver Labs, Naver Cloud, Naver Works, CLOVA CIC, and GLACE CIC converge. The entire building is expected to become a testing ground for 5G robot experiments.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.