经济学人下载:韩国互联网巨头 机不可失

Business
商业报道

South Korea's internet giant
韩国互联网巨头

Now or Naver
机不可失

At home, South Korea's biggest web portal has thrashed Yahoo and kept Google at bay.
在国内市场，韩国最大的门户网站Naver已经击败了雅虎和谷歌。

Now its owner plans to conquer the world with its messaging service
而现在，这间公司的老板正准备以手中的即时通讯软件去征服世界

Cutesy characters cost extra
可爱的卡通人物则需要额外收费

DOWN jackets are typically stuffed with duck, not chicken, feathers. Why? Ask Naver.
羽绒服里通常以鸭绒作为原料，那为什么不用鸡的羽毛呢？去问Naver就行。

So ran an ad in 2003 for a South Korean web portal of that name featuring an innovative, crowdsourced question-and-answer service.
而这正是2003年韩国门户网站Naver所打出的广告，并且，这广告是以一项革新的聚众问答服务为特点来推广自己。

In spite of such features, Naver's chances looked slim as it was launched into a crowded market dominated by Yahoo of America and Daum, another South Korean company.
尽管有着自己的一些特色，但在一个早已被美国的雅虎和另一间韩国公司Daum所垄断了的市场里，Naver似乎没有什么商机。

Last year Naver indexed its 100-millionth question: a user asking for the title of a particular song, that begins with a giggle.
去年，Naver录得它的第1亿个提问：一位用户在询问一首以傻笑开头的歌。

An answer took just 14 minutes to arrive: Blow, by Kesha, an American singer.
仅仅14分钟，他便得到了答案：一位美国歌手Kesha所唱的歌曲Blow。

Every day around 18m people visit its homepage.
每天大约有1千8百万人浏览它的主页。

It has almost 80% of the South Korean search market, making the country one of just three where Google is not top.
在国内搜索市场中，Naver拥有约80%的使用量，而这让韩国成为了谷歌公司无法称霸的三个国家之一。

Google accounts for just 4% of searches; Yahoo, now trailing behind as the tenth most-visited portal, stopped producing specialist content for the South Korean market in 2012.
在韩国，谷歌仅占有4%的搜索使用量；目前已经在常用门户网站排行中落到了第十位置的雅虎，在2012年便停止了为韩国市场提供专门的栏目。

When Naver was set up, there were not many web pages written in Korean.
Naver创立之时，韩国还没有太多网站。

So the Q&A service was a masterstroke—the users who answered others' questions provided lots of free content.
所以这套问答服务推出是一个非常绝妙的举动—用户们可以在这儿提问并得到免费的回答。

Naver handed out grades, from commoner to superman, to encourage them to keep writing.
Naver还给用户们进行了从平民到超人的评级，以鼓励他们的持续贡献。

Everyone wanted to be God in cyberspace, says Lim Wonki, the author of The Secret of Naver's Success, published in 2007.
2007年出版的《Naver的成功秘诀》作者Lim Wonki曾表示：每个人都想做虚拟世界的上帝。

Some Western web portals are suffering declining ad revenues, but Naver's are still rising.
部分西方门户网站正处于广告收益下滑的处境当中，但Naver却仍在增长。

Jay Park of Samsung Securities, a stockbroker, says the portal's online-advertising sales, which provide three-quarters of Naver's revenues, grew by 7.7% last year.
三星证券股票经纪杰?帕克说，去年占该网站总收入四分之三的在线广告业务收入增长了7.7%。

He expects it to keep growing at this sort of rate.
他期望该网站能保持这样的增长比率。

As the money rolls in, it no longer has to rely on free material from users, and can buy up lots of exclusive content, from encyclopedias to videos, which it blocks rival search engines from accessing.
随着现金的增加，Naver不再需要去以来用户们的免费资源，从而可以收购从百科到视频各种类别的专属项目，接着便可以屏蔽其竞争对手的搜索引擎。

Unsurprisingly, this annoys them.
不出所料地，这一行为引起了其竞争对手们愤慨。

In 2012 Kim In-sung, who built up Empas, a search engine, published a critical book, Naver's Two Faces.
2012年，Empas搜索引擎创始人金贤成出版了1本名为《Naver的两副面孔》的书来抨击Naver。

He says it is heaven for users but a black hole for content providers.
他表示，虽然对用户们来说是天堂，但对于内容提供者来说则是黑洞。

News organisations grumble that Naver pays them a pittance for licensing their stories.
多家新闻组织抱怨Naver仅给予他们微薄的报酬便使用了他们的报道。

Naver started out as an in-house venture by the IT division of Samsung, the country's largest industrial conglomerate.
最初，Naver是作为韩国最大的企业联合集团三星IT部门中的一个内部分支。

But Samsung had sold the last of its shares in the company by 2004 and Naver is now the sixth-largest of the companies in the local KOSPI share index.
但三星早已在2004年以前就将全部Naver的股权卖出，与此同时Naver已经是韩国本地股市KOSPI中规模排行第六的公司。

Mr Kim says it has begun to exhibit some of the least attractive traits of the chaebol, in particular by buying up smaller potential rivals and by using its market power to stop other portals getting access to content.
金先生说目前Naver已经开始展现出了一些财阀特有的且不受人欢迎的行为，尤其是在收购小型潜在对手以及利用自身的市场力量去妨碍其他门户网站取得资讯方面表现得极为明显。

In 2013 the country's Fair Trade Commission threatened the firm with a big fine, for allegedly unfair business practices.
2013年，国家公平交易委员会因而警告该公司，声称他们将会对不公平交易行为开出巨额罚单。

Naver persuaded it to drop this in return for it spending 100 billion won on helping smaller internet firms and on educating consumers about their rights.
为了平复此事，最终Naver拿出1000亿韩元来进行对小型互联网公司的赞助，以及对消费者权益进行推广，从而说服了委员会取消罚款计划。

Naver responds to all this by arguing that users still have a choice of portals:
Naver对以上种种指控，则回应用户依然能够选择自己要使用的门户：

when a nude video of a Korean singer went online last November, visits to Google spiked because Naver had blocked it.
去年十一月，当一个韩国歌手的裸体视频被发到网上，由于Naver屏蔽了该视频，谷歌的浏览量随之急剧攀升。

Naver also says it is itself suffering unfair conditions in the mobile market, because 90% of South Korean smartphones run on Google's Android operating system, which offers Google as the default search engine.
与此同时，Naver还声称在移动终端市场里，自己才是遭受到不平等竞争的一方：韩国90%的智能手机使用的都是由谷歌公司开发的安卓系统，这意味着谷歌能够以默认搜索引擎这一方式来攻占移动搜索市场。

Despite this, Google has only 15% of the mobile search market.
但尽管如此，谷歌现在仅占有15%的移动搜索市场份额。

Go abroad, go mobile
走向国际，走向移动

A bigger threat is KakaoTalk, a mobile platform and messaging app that, like Naver, offers games, e-books, photo storage and other services, launched in 2010 by a founder of Naver who left the firm. South Koreans now spend more time on it than they do on Naver.
还有个更大的威胁是来自一款移动平台和即时通讯软件KakaoTalk。就像Naver一样，KakaoTalk也提供了游戏、电子阅读、照片储存以及一些其他服务。这是一款由Naver其中一位创始人离职后在2010年所推出的产品。目前，韩国人在KakaoTalk的使用时长上，已经压倒了Naver。

KakaoTalk's domestic success spurred Naver to go abroad and go mobile.
KakaoTalk在国内市场的成功，促使着Naver要走向国际，以及走向移动。

When a tsunami hit Japan in 2011, Naver's employees there huddled at the office and, in one-and-a-half months, created Line, a free mobile messaging and call service that is now being promoted as the Facebook of Asia.
2011年日本受到海啸袭击之时，Naver的员工们在办公室里齐心协力，前后花了一个半月的时间最终开发出了一款免费移动通信软件，也就是如今被人推为亚洲Facebook的Line。

Within 18 months it hit the 100m-user mark, which took Facebook and Twitter around four years; in November 2013 it surpassed 300m downloads, making it a serious rival for WhatsApp, an American messaging service Facebook is paying $19 billion for.
Facebook与Twitter花了四年时间才累积到了100万名用户，而Line在18个月内就完成了这项指标；在2013年11月里，Line获得了超过300万次的下载，而这则令其成为了WhatsApp的强劲对手。

If, as Mr Park predicts, Naver owes half of its revenue to Line in five years, it will have become one of Korea's few global players among internet firms.
正如帕克先生所预言的，如果Naver能在五年内令Line的收入攀升至集团总收入的一半，那么它将成为少数能在国际市场上分一杯羹的韩国互联网公司。

However, Naver's shares fell sharply on February 20th, after Facebook announced its takeover of WhatsApp—on the assumption that the social network's backing would make WhatsApp impossible to beat.
然而在Facebook宣布了其对WhatsApp的并购之后，2月20日当天Naver的股价严重下挫。

Naver's shares recovered this week on rumours, which it denied, that a big Japanese tech firm, Softbank, was offering to buy a stake in Line.
这正是基于外界的猜测：有了社交网络的支持后，WhatsApp将成为一个无法击败巨人。由于传闻称日本科技巨头软银将入股Line，本周Naver的股价有所回升，但Naver方面否认了这一消息。

Naver's early attempts to get into big foreign markets went badly.
Naver早前拓展海外市场的尝试均以失败告终。

Plans aired in 2009 for a Naver California and a Naver Korean-American never took off.
2009年，公司计划的两个项目Naver之攻陷加州和Naver之美韩联合从未得到执行。

Another big rival to Line, WeChat, is the most popular messaging app in China and, like KakaoTalk, is backed by Tencent, Asia's biggest internet firm.
Line的另一位强劲对手则是微信，这款软件与KakaoTalk一样有着全亚洲最大的互联网公司—腾讯的支持，而且目前微信早已成为了中国市场中最热门的即时通讯软件。

So Naver is concentrating on two smaller countries where Line already has a foothold, Thailand and Taiwan, and on places where smartphone use is low but set to boom, such as India and Mexico.
因此Naver在重心转移到了自己先前进行市场开发过的两个较小的国家和地区—泰国和台湾，以及一些智能手机普及率低但即将有爆炸性增长的国家和地区如印度和墨西哥。

In the past year it has spent around 250 billion won on marketing its messaging app in these and other countries.
过去几年中，Naver已经在上述的和其他的一些国家地区花费了约2500亿韩元来推广自己的即时通讯软件。

But Naver's real strength abroad, says Mr Park, is its decade of experience in the portal business, doing everything from games to shopping to online newspapers.
但帕克先生表示，在海外市场中，Naver真正的优势在于其长年累月的门户网站业务经验—他的无所不能包含了从游戏到网络购物到线上报纸新闻的所有服务。

Line can do all these too, whereas WhatsApp is, until Facebook gets its hands on it, mainly a messaging service.
Line也能够做到上述一切。相比之下，在Facebook接管之前WhatsApp仅仅只是一个即时通讯应用。

Facebook still relies heavily on advertising, but Line makes 70% of its money from games and electronic stickers—oversize and elaborate emoticons, with names such as Cony the Rabbit and Brown the Bear, which users can insert into picture messages.
现在Facebook的收入仍十分依赖于广告业务，但Line已经从游戏和电子贴图业务中赚取了70%的利润。该软件的电子贴图是特大号的精美表情符号，且不同的表情符号有各自的人物和名字，例如可妮兔和布朗熊。用户可以通过图片信息的方式发送电子贴图。

Coca-Cola and Barcelona football club have paid Line to design special stickers for them.
可口可乐公司与巴萨足球俱乐部已经向Line公司付款并要求其制作专属自己的贴图。

It is unclear if smartphone users in Europe and America will warm to such cutesy characters, but Naver hopes to draw those wary of Facebook's open network to Line Band, a closed social-networking service.
目前还无法确定欧美的智能手机用户们是否会接受如此可爱的卡通人物，但Naver方面希望能将对Facebook的开放性心存疑虑的使用者吸引过来，让他们到自己旗下更具私密性的社交网络平台Line Band上互动。

Though Mr Park expects Line's valuation to converge with that of Facebook in the long term, for now it is tiny by comparison—about 9% the size.
虽然帕克先生期望Line的估值能从长远角度看追上Facebook，但两者对比起来Line的规模还是非常小-大约是后者的9%。

Nevertheless, in 2010 Naver's founder, Lee Hae-jin, chided employees for slacking and reminded them of their company's master plan: a first decade struggling; a second decade, marching to number one.
尽管如此，Naver的创始人李海珍在2010年鞭策着员工们，提醒着他们公司有着宏大的目标：头十年里努力奋斗；在第二个十年内，走向世界之巅。