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| Kakao Chief Executive Officer Rim Ji-hoon |
By Yoon Sung-won
JEJU ― Kakao, the operator of the nation's most-used mobile messenger service KakaoTalk, pledged Tuesday to expand its mobile business portfolio to provide a total on-demand service lineup for its customers.
Kakao Chief Executive Officer Rim Ji-hoon held his first press conference at the company's headquarters here and revealed his vision for the company's future focused on the on-demand sector.
"The company will concentrate on on-demand, which creates value by connecting people and services based on the mobile platform," Rim said. "We will also be more active in building a people-centric business culture and in vitalizing the startup business ecosystem."
The 35-year-old CEO said the existing mobile services have remained in an initial stage where desktop services were transplanted to mobile platforms.
"In the true mobile era when all real economy activities become available using smartphones, we will be able to create unprecedented business opportunities by building the on-demand environment," he said.
According to Rim, Kakao's on-demand business will offer offline-to-online services including its mobile call taxi application, KakaoTaxi, as well as others ranging from mobile and online searching, content, games, advertisements and financing, that meet every demand from each customer.
Rim took office in August, replacing co-CEOs Lee Sirgoo and Choi Sae-hoon. Before his inauguration as new Kakao chief, he founded and headed a venture capital named K Cube Venture, an affiliate to Kakao.
"I will lead Kakao and its employees based on my faith in people, which has been my business philosophy since I founded K Cube Ventures," he said. "I believe I could succeed in the venture capital sector because I was good at discovering a person's strength and giving him or her faith. I will continue to do so at Kakao."
As a first step, Rim said he has started a program through which he met with 100 employees and talked with them personally so they could learn more about one another.
"During the program, I came to learn that Kakao's employees want a business environment where they can strengthen personal capability and seek to change the company to follow the rapid changes in the mobile industry," he said.
Under Rim's leadership, Kakao has newly organized what it calls the Chief eXecutive Officer (CXO) Team, which consists of six chief executives, to speed up business operations. The company also named an experienced engineer as the head of the People & Culture Team, aiming at establishing a corporate culture that encourages directors and developers, who play the key role in mobile service development projects, to suggest creative ideas.
Rim also promised to expand investment in startups and strengthen collaboration with business partners.
"Kakao has invested about 400 billion won in startups since 2010 and has generated some 2.45 trillion won every year in e-commerce, game and content businesses as a platform operator by actively collaborating with business partners," the CEO said.
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