Korean web large Naver eyes North America, Europe because it grows its C2C market enterprise • TechCrunch

Do you know that Google isn’t the highest search engine in South Korea? It’s not even a detailed second.

Most Koreans truly favor Naver for numerous causes, and so they prefer it a lot that the search engine holds about 56% of the market, per Statista. Google is catching up, but it surely at present solely has a couple of 35% share, and it’ll probably be some time earlier than it will probably shut the hole.

Naver’s different choices are additionally obtained fairly nicely within the nation, together with its e-commerce platform, messaging, funds, storytelling, digital comics (webtoons), metaverse efforts, a selfie app, video games, the cloud and extra.

However like all true tech firm, Naver was by no means happy with its success at dwelling. The corporate rapidly expanded to Japan, and extra broadly in Southeast Asia. However as a substitute of main with its core search engine and e-commerce companies, it as a substitute opted for various methods in every new nation, similar to increasing in Japan with its Line messaging app and rising its footprint in Southeast Asia with its 3D avatar app, Zepeto, and different choices.

It’s now increasing its e-commerce enterprise — wildly profitable in South Korea with 18% of the market — with a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market mannequin that it goals to supply in North America, Europe and Asia. In contrast to many B2C marketplaces, which normally promote massive portions of some worthwhile, in style objects, Naver’s e-commerce technique is specializing in long-tail enterprise, permitting sellers to promote small portions of hard-to-find objects to patrons on the lookout for area of interest merchandise.

It needs so as to add a social community characteristic, which permits sellers to obtain feedback, likes and customers in its e-commerce unit. To that finish, the corporate earlier this month mentioned it will purchase Redwood, California-based social commerce market Poshmark for $1.2 billion.