Naver

After wage talks broke down at Naver Z (Naver's metaverse subsidiary, maker of Zepeto) with management proposing a salary freeze and cutting incentives to one-tenth of prior levels, the Naver Union formally demanded integrated bargaining covering all 15 Naver affiliated corporations, arguing Naver exercises real control over affiliates through full ownership stakes, shared administration, and personnel authority. Naver responded that it is not the practical employer of affiliate workers. On October 2, 2026 the union filed what it said was the IT industry's first legal action under the amended Trade Union Act ('Yellow Envelope Act') with the Gyeonggi Regional Labor Relations Commission, seeking a ruling that Naver must join the bargaining as a joint employer.

Naver Z, operator of the Zepeto metaverse platform and majority-owned by Naver, saw about 70% of union members join a full one-day walkout on September 23, 2026 after two rounds of Labor Relations Commission mediation failed. Management cited a roughly 49.4 billion won ($36.1M) 2025 operating loss in refusing a proposed 5.3% wage increase, instead freezing wages; the union noted Naver affiliates had frozen wages only once before, in 2009, when executive pay rose 71% the same year. The union criticized CEO Kim Chang-wook for lack of transparency and threatened a five-day strike starting mid-October if talks stalled, amid a broader push by Naver's union for unified bargaining across 16 affiliated companies.

Naver's SmartPlace tool for merchants included a booking setting, introduced in June 2025 and revealed publicly in July 2026, instructing business owners: 'If you do not wish to accept reservations and bookings from foreigners, change the setting to off.' Naver said the feature was meant to let merchants avoid processing fees (about 3.85%) and chargeback risk on overseas-issued cards rather than to block foreign customers, but acknowledged the wording 'failed to distinguish between foreign customers and cards issued overseas' and committed to renaming it to a 'global reservation/booking setting.'

In March-April 2024 Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications issued an administrative guidance to LY Corporation (the Naver/SoftBank joint parent of Line) demanding it review and 'reconsider' Naver's involvement, following a 2023 data breach that exposed approximately 519,000 records. Critics including the Korean government characterised the move as a Japanese government attempt to engineer Naver's exit from Line, the dominant messaging platform in Japan. Naver eventually committed to reducing its 50% stake in LY Corporation under sustained pressure.

In August 2023 Naver released HyperClova X, a Korean-first foundation model trained on a corpus that was 97% Korean and 3% English, representing one of the few production-scale LLMs prioritising a non-English language. The release was significant for Korean-language AI sovereignty and reduced dependence on US-trained models for Korean-language applications. Naver also released smaller HCX-Mini variants for on-device and edge deployment in 2024.

In May 2021 a 40-year-old Naver developer died by suicide, leaving notes alleging severe and sustained workplace bullying by his manager. Subsequent Ministry of Employment and Labor inspection found Naver had violated labor law by failing to take action on harassment complaints filed for months prior. CEO Han Seong-sook stepped down in March 2022 in connection with the incident. Naver later instituted independent anti-harassment reporting channels and an external ethics board.