Introducing Naver - Brief History, Businesses and Stock Forecast

 

This article introduces a Korean ICT company 'Naver' including brief company history and businesses. Also, the article will touch upon the prospect of the company as well as the stock price move in the future. If you would like to know about the company and its businesses before making up your mind to buy Naver's stocks, this article can help you.

---

History of Naver

Naver started as an in-house venture of Samsung SDS in 1999. It did not take too long before the venture's potential was recognized and spun off. The name 'Naver' was coined by combining 'Navigate' to find the way and '~er', meaning the person. Therefore Naver indicates 'a person navigating on the sea of information'. At the very beginning of its history in 1999, Naver portal and Junior Naver, a portal for kids officially launched. Since then, it has grown into an ICT giant. But their journey was not without any disputes. Being a search engine, there were allegations that it manipulates real-time search results. And some are concerned that Naver might skew search results in favor of certain politicians. Also, the company keeps its contents from other search engines like Daum and Google. In other words, if you need information in one of Naver's services like blogs and Knowledge In, you must use Naver's search engine.

Despite all these disputes and allegations, the ICT company has grown into the largest search engine portal in Korea. Its closest Korean competitor in the market is Daum. However, the gap between the 2nd player is quite big. The number of Monthly Active Users (MAU) shows this clearly. As of January this year, Naver has about 40M MAUs while Daum about 8.7M. The gap between the two is occupied by Google, whose MAU is about 32M.

 

Naver's Businesses    

Since its launch, Naver expanded its services from internet search engine to various fields. The services Naver currently provides are: 

• Line Messenger
• Snow Camera app
• Naver Webtoon, digital comics platform
• Naver Band, group social media platform
• ZEPETO, metaverse platform
• R&D such as AI, robotics, mobilities, and other future technologies

Naver also works in foreign markets such as

• Japan
• USA
• France
• China
• Vietnam
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Indonesia

Naver Stock Price Forecast

The current price of Naver is KRW 315,500. The share price's peak was about KRW 450,000 in September 2021. Since then, it tumbled down to the current price. Analysts, asked about how the Naver's share would move, gave answers ranging from KRW 370,000 to KRW 580,000 in the 12-month time frame. The average price is KRW 461,630 (46.32% upside). According to the stock analysis site walletinvestor.com, the price could reach KRW 348,303 in 1 year, while growing to KRW 504,508 in 5 years recording almost 60% growth.

Given these estimation numbers and Naver's efforts to push its boundaries beyond internet services to new technologies, now might be a good time to secure some of your share in the company's future.