South Korea’s leading online portal operator Naver Corp. maintained strong earnings in the fourth quarter last year thank to unfazed overseas popularity of its mobile chatting app unit Line and growing ad revenue.

Naver announced on Thursday that it registered 290.3 billion won ($250 million) in operating profit on revenue of 1.1 trillion won in the fourth quarter ended in December last year. The company recorded 190.9 billion won in net profit in the quarter. Revenue surged 21.7 percent from the same period last year, and 35 percent came from offshore.

For full-year 2016, it posted operating profit of 1.1 trillion won on sales of 4.0 trillion won, marking the first time to surpass the 1 trillion won and 4 trillion won milestone. It posted 767.2 billion won in net profit last year.

The online portal operator’s mobile service drove the growth and accounted for 64 percent of the total revenue in the October-December period. The remaining 36 percent share came from computer-based service.

Ad revenue took up the lion’s share of 75.8 percent with 821.9 billion won, the content business, 20.7 percent with 224.2 billion won and others, 3.6 percent with 38.9 billion won.

“This year, we are aiming to create an intelligent personal assistant service that will aid its users around-the-clock in finding the right answers and solving problems,” said Naver Chief Financial Official Park Sang-jin. The company is working hard to introduce smart speaker system in the first half of this year and also preparing other artificial intelligence-based services for applications to everyday life, added Park.

The company’s popular messaging and social media app Snow has been rapidly growing, drawing more than 1 million cumulative subscribers last year and more than a half of them logged for the service every month. The company plans to focus on improving contents for Snow service and securing more users rather than going after profits as the business is still in its an early stage, said Park.

As of 2:37 p.m. on Thursday, shares of Naver were down 1.4 percent at 752,000 won, down 1.4 percent from the previous session.

By Oh Chan-jong

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]