Naver posts all-time high quarterly earnings in Q2

South Korea‘s top internet portal operator Naver reached all-time highs in the second quarter this year, backed by improved performances of the company’s new businesses.

According to Naver, the company’s sales in the April-June period reached 1.66 trillion won ($1.44 billion), increasing 30.4 percent from 1.2 trillion won from a year earlier.

In the second quarter last year, Naver’s sales totaled around 1.9 trillion won, but 680 billion won of the total sales was from Line and other businesses.

The portal giant’s operating profit stood at 335.6 billion won during the three-month period, up 8.9 percent from the year earlier, which marked the largest quarterly figure for the company.

According to Naver, sales from the company’s e-commerce, financial technology, content and cloud businesses in particular have grown to account for more than 50 percent of its combined sales, for the first time in the company’s history.

Previously, Naver’s sales were mainly dependent on its flagship search platform business.

By business, sales from the company’s flagship search platform, which covers its ads business, increased 21.8 percent on-year to reach at 826 billion won in the second quarter.

Sales of Naver’s e-commerce business posted a 42.6 percent on-year increase to reach 365.3 billion won, backed by improved shopping transactions.

Sales of the company’s fintech business went up 41.2 percent to 232.6 billion won in the second quarter. The transaction amount of Naver Pay soared 47 percent to 9.1 trillion won during the same period.

Naver’s cloud business advanced 48.1 percent to 94.9 billion won in sales. Naver said it will soon begin to test the firm’s latest AI tool HyperCLOVA and a cloud-based robot solution, which are expected to help further increase the cloud business sales in the future.

Content sales increased 28.2 percent during the three months, to 144.8 billion won, compared to the same period last year. The sales growth is attributable to an improvement in the webtoon business, which posted a 53 percent sales growth in the second quarter.

Naver said the company will continue to expand its investments in storytelling platforms and leverage their intellectual properties.

Naver CEO Han Seong-sook said the company will utilize a fund valued at 100 billion won forged to accelerate business projects at Wattpad Webtoon Studios, an alliance of the two content units’ studios, launched in June.



By Shim Woo-hyun (ws@heraldcorp.com)