Naver to target global market with webtoons and live broadcasting

Founder of Naver Lee Hae-jin gives speech during the press conference at Naver's data center in Chuncheon, Gangwon Province, in July 2020. / Courtesy of Naver

By Kim Jae-heun

Local information technology (IT) giant Naver is more than ready to make its presence in the global scene felt with its ever popular content business.

The company said it will make every effort to bring about service innovation and technology development in 2021 based on four key ideas: global, technology, SME (small- and medium- enterprise) and creation.

Naver has been targeting the global market since its establishment in 1999 and its plan to become a world-class platform operator looks more feasible this year.

Its webtoon business in the United States is preparing to go public there soon. However, its live broadcasting platform “V Live” is likely to lead Naver's entry in the global scene.

Thanks to the rising popularity of K-pop, more than 100 million people have downloaded the V Live smartphone application as of Dec. 28, last year. V Live provides a live video streaming service mainly for K-pop acts. International viewers constitute 85 percent of the platform's total audience.

And though many internet services offer content free of charge, V Live paid services are seeing continuously increasing sales. As more artists hold online concerts amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of paid events broadcast on V Live have more than doubled compared to last year.

SM Entertainment's K-pop boyband NCT made 8 billion won profit an online concert held on V Live that attracted 20,000 viewers from 124 countries, last month. Naver takes a commission fee for providing the service,

Last year, Naver's Japanese subsidiary Line Corporation completed an antitrust review of the planned corporate integration with Yahoo Japan. In the upcoming March, the joint venture launched by two companies will introduce new services in a wide range of sectors including artificial intelligence (AI), e-commerce, fintech and advertising.

Among its competitors, Naver invests the largest proportion of its profits back into research and development.

The IT firm, in particular, has been recognized for its technological prowess after its researchers conducted 43 studies related to AI. Recently, it also adopted a super computer to aid in establishment of massive-scale linguistic modeling in support of a voice assistant platform. It plans to form a global AI research belt connecting Korea, Japan, Europe and Vietnam to beef up its competitiveness in the global market.

“Through Naver Labs, research on autonomous driving technology and robots have been further enhanced and we have road map to demonstrate this in the Naver new office under construction now. We will be able to introduce the world's first robot-friendly building within this year,” a Naver official said.