Naver Corporation

Is Naver publicly traded?

Yes. Naver Corporation trades on the Korea Exchange under ticker 035420 and is accessible to U.S. investors through OTC markets under NHNCF. It is among the largest KOSPI components.

Who owns Naver?

Naver is widely held by institutional and public shareholders. Founder Lee Hae-jin serves as chairman and remains the most influential individual shareholder, though the company is broadly held.

When was Naver founded?

Lee Hae-jin founded Naver in 1999 in Seongnam, South Korea, after leaving Samsung SDS. The search engine launched to dominance in the early 2000s through its Knowledge iN service.

Who is the CEO of Naver?

Choi Soo-yeon has served as chief executive officer since 2022. Founder Lee Hae-jin serves as chairman of the board.

What does Naver own?

Naver operates its search and portal platform plus businesses including Smart Store, Naver Pay, Webtoon Entertainment (majority-owned and NASDAQ-listed), Naver Cloud, the U.S. resale site Poshmark, and a major stake in Spain's Wallapop.

What is Naver's annual revenue?

For fiscal 2025, Naver reported revenue of KRW 12.04 trillion, up 12.1 percent year over year, with operating profit of KRW 2.21 trillion, an 18.3 percent margin.

Where is Naver headquartered?

Naver is headquartered in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, at the Green Factory building in the Bundang district.

Lee Hae-jin founded Naver in 1999 in Seongnam, spinning it out of Samsung SDS where he had worked as a researcher. The search engine grew through the early 2000s on its Knowledge iN user-generated answers service, which made it more useful for Korean-language queries than global rivals and secured its domestic dominance.

The company listed on the Korea Exchange and expanded through the 2000s and 2010s into adjacent businesses: Naver Pay in payments, Smart Store in e-commerce, and content businesses including webtoons that became a global export. A 2013 corporate split separated it from gaming business NHN Entertainment.

Naver's international growth accelerated through the 2010s with the Line messaging app, built with Japanese partner SoftBank and once a dominant platform in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand before the 2021 Z Holdings combination shifted that structure. Content businesses scaled globally: Webtoon Entertainment listed on the NASDAQ in 2024 with Naver retaining majority control.

The 2023 acquisition of Poshmark for $1.2 billion was Naver's largest deal and its biggest bet on Western consumer internet, buying the U.S. social resale marketplace to anchor a global C2C strategy alongside its Wallapop investment. Fiscal 2025 produced record results: revenue of KRW 12.04 trillion, up 12.1 percent, with operating profit of KRW 2.21 trillion and announced plans to invest KRW 6 trillion in AI and future businesses through 2030.

Naver publishes an integrated ESG report covering its Korean operations, with commitments to carbon neutrality for its data centers and offices and significant renewable energy procurement for its Seongnam headquarters.

The company has achieved strong domestic ESG ratings and operates a foundation supporting Korean small businesses and content creators. Its Green Factory headquarters was built to environmental standards.

The Poshmark and Wallapop acquisitions align it with circular-economy business models, giving its commerce strategy an inherent sustainability narrative in recommerce, though no B Corp or equivalent certification applies at the group level.

Naver's domestic dominance has drawn sustained regulatory scrutiny in Korea, where its market position across search, commerce, and fintech has prompted antitrust attention from the Korea Fair Trade Commission over issues including self-preferencing its own services in search results.

The 2021 to 2023 period brought scrutiny of workplace culture after an employee suicide led to an internal investigation and commitments to improve, a prominent labor-relations episode in Korean corporate news.

Internationally, the Poshmark acquisition drew questions about data governance between the U.S. platform and its Korean owner, though no regulatory action has resulted. Korean analysts have also publicly questioned the Poshmark deal's returns given the subsidiary's modest growth since acquisition.