In the South Korean Internet market, NHN makes domination look easy. Expanding the borders of its search kingdom, however, has proven to be a difficult challenge.
The company, which controls more than 70 percent of Korea’s search market through Naver (www.naver.com), had been looking to expand internationally and picked Japan as its first target. Nine years later, NHN is still stuck on the first step.
Granted, it isn’t that NHN is totally missing out. Hangame Japan (www.hangame.co.jp), the localized version of NHN’s online games portal, has enjoyed modest success.
However, finding a winning formula for Naver, which would be a truer indicator of the company’s overseas performance, remains elusive. After five years of irrelevance, NHN closed its Japanese search page in 2005 to the noise of crickets.
Obviously, NHN doesn’t intend to remain a bad joke for long, as it is renewing its attempt to penetrate the Japanese search market. Last week, the company announced the establishment of the Next Human Search Technology Corporation (NHST) Japan, a Fukuoka-based unit that will perform database analysis and study search patterns.
The new affiliate will work closely with Naver Japan (www.naver.jp), established in November 2007 as the headquarters of NHN’s Japanese search business, thus freeing NHN Japan to focus predominantly on online games.
NHST Japan is listed as the local unit of NHST, a China-based company established in December 2007, and represents NHN’s efforts to streamline its business strategies and product development in the three Asian countries.
NHST Japan is also seen as the latest sign that NHN is close to revealing its new Japanese search engine.
The company had initially planned to launch the search engine late last year, but the debut was delayed repeatedly, with NHN ending up looking like the “boy who cried wolf,’’ in the words of company chief executive Choi Hwi-young.
And the point of the story is, as always, the wolf eventually shows up. Although NHN has yet to announce the details of its Japanese business plans for the year, company officials expect Naver Japan to launch its search engine as early as during the first quarter.
“The development of the search engine is nearing completion and we won’t keep you waiting too long for the beta version,’’ said an NHN official, adding that Naver Japan had recently completed hiring its local workforce.
“Differentiating our services from other search engines in Japan will be key for us and we’ve invested a lot of effort to come up with something new and innovative. We want to reveal a finished and polished product, not a rough and green one, and the timing of the launch was the least of our concerns,’’ he said.
