Naver's quarterly revenue breaks $1 billion, hits record

Logo of Naver. [NAVER]

Naver’s revenue broke $1 billion in the third quarter and hit a record as webtoons became international hits.

Revenue came in at 1.36 trillion won ($1.2 billion), up 24.2 percent on year and 6.6 percent on quarter. Net profit was 235.3 billion won, up 176 percent on year. Operating profit increased by 1.8 percent from last year to 291.7 billion won.

Portal advertising sales were half of total sales but only grew 8.2 percent on year. Sales in its financial unit were up 67.6 percent on year to 174 billion won.

More financial services, such as loans for small businesses, will be added by next year, Naver said. The IT company is developing its own credit rating system which will be utilized for its loan business by the end of November.

Sales from its shopping platform increased on year 40.9 percent to 285.4 billion won. Sales volume was up by 72 percent from last year.

“Fifteen percent of the transaction on the Naver store in September came from Plus members, and their sales tripled after signing up,” said Han Seong-sook, the company’s CEO at a conference call, Thursday. “We plan to secure more than two million people by the end of this year”

Naver Plus is a subscription service which gives a 4 percent discount on transactions made via Naver Pay. The company is planning to make Naver Pay available at offline stores by the next quarter.

Revenue generated by Naver intellectual property rose 31.8 percent on year to 115 billion won. This was largely the result of the increasing global sales of its webtoon content, especially in Europe and Central America. International readers purchased more than 220 billion won of Naver webtoons, which is up 40 percent from last year.

Han said Naver will strengthen its partnership with Studio Dragon of CJ Group to secure competitive intellectual property as well as strengthen its paper comic book business through Line Manga, which underwent a major restructuring in August.

Naver’s cloud-related businesses grew 66.2 percent on year, as demand grew for remote work infrastructure. Sales generated by its cloud platforms spiked by 156 percent on year. Naver says it will strengthen its business-to-business cloud services.

“We saw good performance in the third quarter as our new growth engines — commerce, fintech, contents and cloud — businesses showed even growth,” said Han. “We will continue to partner with other companies to create business synergy.”

BY KANG JAE-EUN [kang.jaeeun@joongang.co.kr]