Korean internet giant Naver eyes North America, Europe as it grows its C2C marketplace business - TechCrunch

Did you know that Google isn’t the apical hunt motor successful South Korea? It’s not adjacent a adjacent second.

Most Koreans really similar Naver for assorted reasons, and they similar it truthful overmuch that the hunt motor holds astir 56% of the market, per Statista. Google is catching up, but it presently lone has astir a 35% share, and it’ll apt beryllium a portion earlier it tin adjacent the gap.

Naver’s different offerings are besides received rather good successful the country, including its e-commerce platform, messaging, payments, storytelling, digital comics (webtoons), metaverse efforts, a selfie app, games, the cloud and more.

But similar immoderate existent tech company, Naver was ne'er satisfied with its occurrence astatine home. The institution rapidly expanded to Japan, and much wide successful Southeast Asia. But alternatively of starring with its halfway hunt motor and e-commerce businesses, it alternatively opted for antithetic strategies successful each caller country, specified arsenic expanding successful Japan with its Line messaging app and expanding its footprint successful Southeast Asia with its 3D avatar app, Zepeto, and different offerings.

It’s present expanding its e-commerce concern — wildly palmy successful South Korea with 18% of the marketplace — with a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace exemplary that it aims to connection successful North America, Europe and Asia. Unlike galore B2C marketplaces, which usually merchantability ample quantities of a fewer profitable, fashionable items, Naver’s e-commerce strategy is focusing connected long-tail business, allowing sellers to merchantability tiny quantities of hard-to-find items to buyers looking for niche products.

It wants to adhd a societal web feature, which allows sellers to person comments, likes and users successful its e-commerce unit. To that end, the institution earlier this period said it would bargain Redwood, California-based societal commerce marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion.