NAVER

NAVER began in 1999 with its own search engine, was called NHN after a merger with the games company Hangame, and took the NAVER Corporation name when the two split in 2013. It is listed on the Korea Exchange and headquartered in Seongnam, south of Seoul, in 1784, its robot-friendly office building, next to its earlier home, the Green Factory.

It runs South Korea's largest search portal and builds commerce (SmartStore, Plus Store), payments (NAVER Pay), maps, cloud services (NAVER Cloud), its own data centres (GAK) and HyperCLOVA X, its large language model. The group also includes Webtoon Entertainment, listed on Nasdaq since 2024, the resale marketplace Poshmark, the fiction platform Wattpad, and NAVER LABS, whose European lab near Grenoble grew out of Xerox's former research centre.

According to the company's figures for the end of 2025, NAVER Corporation itself had 5,047 employees, 2,582 of them in technical roles. Most of them work in Seongnam, while group companies such as NAVER Cloud, NAVER Financial and NAVER WEBTOON have their own staff.