Naver Leads Domestic R&D Investment with 25% of Revenue Allocated

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] Among domestic companies, Naver has been identified as having the highest proportion of investment in research and development (R&D).

According to Naver's business report on the 21st, it invested 1.3321 trillion KRW in R&D last year. This is an increase of 236.5 billion KRW compared to the previous year, marking the largest scale ever. The R&D investment ratio compared to sales (5.0341 trillion KRW) is 25.11%, which is significantly higher than other domestic companies.

In terms of investment amount alone, it ranks second after Kia (1.673 trillion KRW), but Kia's sales last year were 59.1681 trillion KRW, more than 10 times that of Naver. In other words, Naver is far ahead in terms of proportion.

Representative competitor Kakao spent a total of 535.4 billion KRW on R&D last year. This is about 12.9% of its sales.

A Naver official said, "Naver's R&D expenses are at a very high level even compared to overseas companies such as Google and Amazon, whose R&D investment is in the 10% range relative to sales."

With this large-scale investment, Naver completed the development of technologies for 46 projects last year, including deep learning-based video encoding optimization and the development of the V Live virtual reality (VR) platform.

Currently, Naver is conducting 133 R&D projects. These include Naver's own blockchain platform, facial recognition technology, and multilingual processing research.

Naver plans to further increase investment in the development of core technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and cloud.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.