Invested 150 billion won in Naver’s Spanish carrot market

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Naver has invested 150 billion won in Wallapop, an online commerce company called the Spanish Carrot Market. It is the largest investment in Europe after Xerox Research Center Europe (now Naver Labs Europe) acquired in 2017. The industry sees that Naver invested more than 200 billion won at the time.

According to the investment banking (IB) industry on the 25th, Naver recently invested 115 million euros (about 155.2 billion won) in Wallapop, a mobile-based used trading platform company. It is reported that the stake secured by this investment exceeds 10%. The number of wallapop users introduced in 2013 reached 15 million, which is half of Spain’s population. Among Spanish shopping apps, it has the fourth most users. Like the carrot market, a local community platform in Korea, it is known that the trade of household goods among participants is active.

Photo = Yonhap News

With this investment, Naver is able to increase its competitiveness in the platform business targeting the global’MZ generation’ (millennial generation born in the early 1980s to 2000s and Gen Z born in the mid 1990s to early 2000s). More than half of Wallapop users are in their teens and 20s.

Naver acquired a stake in Wattpad, the world’s number one web novel company, for 65.2 billion won last month. The main users of Whatpad are also MZ generation. The reason Naver recently invested in Big Hit Entertainment and merged the two companies’ K-pop fan community platforms into one is to attract the MZ generation into the customer group. Naver’s related service V Live and Big Hit’s Weverse users total more than 35 million. More than 70% of them are in their 10s to 20s overseas. More than 80% of users of Zepeto, an avatar-based global SNS launched by Naver in 2018, are also teenagers.

It recently exceeded 200 million cumulative subscribers. A Naver official explained, “We plan to improve the services favored by global MZ generations, such as ZEPETO, webtoon, and fan community service, and continue to actively invest overseas.”

Lee Hae-jin raises’IT alliance’ to confront the US and China

This is not the first time Naver’s investment in Europe. It started with an investment of 200 million euros (about 270 billion won) in the’K Fund’, an investment fund for European startups in 2016. The K-Fund is a fund created by Corelia Capital, a venture capital (VC) founded by former French digital economy minister Fleur Pellerin. Through this fund, Naver has invested in European start-ups with global competitiveness, such as Deviale, a manufacturer of high-end audio equipment, Snipps, an artificial intelligence (AI) company related to speech recognition, and AVTEST, a data analysis company.

In the industry, Naver’s targeting in the European market is a result of a strong reflection of the intention of the founder Hae Jin Hae-jin (GIO). Naver accelerated its entry into the European market with the fact that its subsidiary Line was listed on the New York and Japanese Tokyo stocks in 2016. At the press conference commemorating the listing at the time, this GIO emphasized, “Up to now, LINE has focused on protecting Japan and Southeast Asia, but in the future, Europe and North America will become the’dream market’ that we must challenge.” It said that the funds secured through the listing of Line (about 1.5 trillion won) will be invested in attracting technology and talent. This GIO explained, “We will come up with various plans, such as establishing overseas research institutes and promoting cooperation with famous universities.” The following year, Naver acquired the French Xerox Research Center Europe (now Naver Labs Europe), the largest AI research center in Europe.

This GIO has been focusing on the role of GIO in charge of overseas investment mainly in Europe by dropping the chairmanship of the board of directors and the in-house director positions at Naver in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, as an interlocutor at a public event after three years, he said, “I hope that Naver will remain a company that has resisted the imperialism of the US and China, which dominates 99% of the global information technology (IT) market.

Naver is also expanding its influence in Asia. Mirae Asset and’Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund’ were jointly formed and invested in promising startups in Asia. Hundreds of billions of billion won were invested in Grab, the largest mobility company in Southeast Asia, Jomato, the second largest food delivery industry in India, and Carousel, the largest used product trading platform in Southeast Asia.

The power of the’global alliance’ that this GIO envisions is expected to grow even further. This is because it attracted the largest portal company in Japan as a friend. This GIO will lead the co-president of A Holdings, a joint venture between LINE and Yahoo Japan, launched this year. The addition of LINE (82 million) and Yahoo Japan (50 million) users reaches 132 million. It is taking a leap into a giant Internet company that is difficult to find competitors in Japan.

Reporter Kim Joo-wan [email protected]