Kakao beats Naver in brand value

February 27, 2014 Leave a comment

2014-02-23 17:06

Kakao beats Naver in brand value

By Kim Rahn
Kakao Talk topped Naver in brand value, a survey showed, Sunday.
Brandstock, a research firm specializing in the ranking of brands, said Kakao Talk ranked first in its survey in the Internet category in February, with 912.74 points out of 1,000.
Naver came next with 906.37 points. This is the first time in 10 years for the portal site to lose the top place since it overtook Daum in 2004.
Naver’s value fell last year along with a string of controversies over its alleged unfair business practices by taking advantage of its market dominance.
On the contrary, Kakao Talk, which started as a mobile messenger in 2010, has grown fast on the back of the smartphone boom, becoming a global mobile social networking platform with 135 million memberships across the world.
“We’ll keep providing services that fulfill the desire for communication, creating a new mobile ecosystem,” an official of Kakao said.
Naver was followed by Facebook, which gained 891 points; Twitter, 886.78 points; Daum, 807.21 points; mobile messenger Line, 802.95 points; and social networking service Band, 802.9 points.
“There were five mobile services in the top 10 list. With the use of mobile platforms growing, the competition between portal sites and mobile services for brand value will become keen,” a staffer at Brandstock said.
According to a separate survey by Nielsen KoreanClick in January, the personal computer-version of Kakao Talk also topped the ranking of PC messengers in terms of the number of users. The PC-version has recorded more than 17 million downloads since its launch last June.

Filed under Macro Trends, TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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