Naver (035420.KS), which has declared a focus on securing offline data this year, is expanding the integration between point-of-sale (POS) terminals and its own services. Since last year, the company has also been significantly expanding its location information search feature, "Naver Place." The move reflects the company's view that the battleground determining artificial intelligence (AI) competitiveness is shifting from online to offline data.
According to the information technology (IT) industry on the 26th, Naver recently launched a service that combines Naver login with the QR ordering function of OKPOS, the leading POS solution brand by market share. QR ordering refers to a system in which customers scan a QR code attached to a restaurant table with their mobile phone to check the menu and complete payment and ordering. The newly unveiled service is distinguished by requiring customers to be logged into Naver when placing QR orders.
Through this, Naver can secure a variety of transaction data, including order time slots and users' gender and age. Restaurants that adopt the service can benefit from increased visibility in Naver search results. Naver had previously rolled out its own QR ordering function in 2019, and the latest move is interpreted as leveraging OKPOS's distribution network of 260,000 affiliated stores to maximize data collection. Naver also plans to expand the number of POS brands to which this service applies.
This effort is an extension of Naver's recently formalized push to expand offline data collection. At last month's first-quarter earnings briefing, CEO Choi Soo-yeon said, "This year, we plan to concentrate our capabilities on securing offline data," adding, "Offline data is expected to serve as a core foundation for Naver's agentic AI competitiveness."
Naver's focus on offline data is aimed at improving the completeness of "agentic AI." The company is pursuing the introduction of AI agents across all service areas, including shopping, finance, and health. In particular, it places importance on ensuring that AI agent recommendations lead to "actual actions" such as payment and reservations. To do so, agents must produce search results that accurately capture users' intent and context, which in turn requires abundant user data. Naver has accumulated extensive online user data, led by its blog and shopping services, but has been relatively weak in offline user data. The company's plan is to add offline data to build a "moat" that domestic and international platform companies cannot encroach upon. This confidence is also made possible by the fact that the Naver Map application's market share reaches 70%.
In fact, Naver has been steadily laying the groundwork for securing offline data. A representative example is the "Place Plus" beta feature unveiled in September last year, which links data collected from POS solutions to Naver Place search results. Restaurants that apply this feature have detailed metrics, such as popular visit times and average payment amounts, exposed alongside Naver search results. The number of integrated POS brands started at three and has recently grown to eight. In addition, Naver launched its own offline payment terminal, "Npay Connect," in November last year. In December of the same year, it partnered with the in-store waiting platform "Tabling" to introduce a vacancy-check function on Naver Place, and this month it added a remote queueing feature.
Naver's urgent moves are also seen as a response to "portal giant" Google, which is accelerating its transition to an AI-centered search system. At its annual developer event held on the 19th, Google unveiled a revamp that broadly applies AI agents to its search function. Domestically, Google received conditional approval from the government in February to export high-precision map data, making it imperative for Naver to rapidly upgrade its map and Place features. "Local commercial districts in Korea are an area where Naver holds an edge over its competitors," an industry official said. "The key question is how much meaningful offline transaction data it can secure within this year."
