A recent economist article talks about why google and yahoo have less than 3% market share each in the south korean market. Naver, a South Korean search company owns a massive 76% share of the market.
Like Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia, Naver uses heavy localization. It offers a korean search page along side news, stock quotes, videos and other user generated content that users in Korea search for. One of the key features of Naver is a Q & A search engine, where users help each other out via the Naver web interface.
The company is now the most profitable in South Korea and employs “27,000 workers, posted 299 billion won, or $325 million, in profit out of 573 billion won in sales last year. It has a market value of nearly 8 trillion won”.
So google’s model of globalization has yet again failed in south korea. The complete economist article can be found here: Google in Asia
0 Responses to “Google owns less than 3% market share in South Korea”