"It seems management isn't interested in boosting the stock price."
"I'm stuck with a 30% loss, and the stock still isn't rising. It's frustrating."
"Instead of raising the cap on directors' compensation, freeze it and increase shareholder dividends first."
At Naver's 2026 shareholders meeting held on the 23rd at the Naver Green Factory in Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi, shareholders kept up sharp demands. Despite record earnings and increased dividends, the stock price has struggled to gain momentum, leading shareholders to ask the company to present plans to enhance shareholder value before expanding investment in artificial intelligence (AI) and new businesses. Naver's share price has fallen 30.5% from the June high last year of 298,000 won to 207,000 won on the 9th of this month.
Naver posted record results last year with sales of 12.035 trillion won and operating profit of 2.2081 trillion won on a consolidation basis. The settlement of account dividends also increased from 1,130 won to 2,630 won per share, and the total dividends rose from 168.4 billion won to 393.6 billion won. Still, shareholders cited the sluggish stock rebound despite the earnings improvement and dividends expansion, saying their perceived satisfaction was not high.
Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon said that day, "We will expand our mid- to long-term growth foundation based on AI- and data-driven platform competitiveness, new technologies, and global business." Naver said it expanded the Generative AI-based integrated search result summary service "AI Briefing" to about 20% of integrated search queries last year, with about 30 million users. Search platform sales were 4.1689 trillion won, up 5.6% from a year earlier, and commerce sales were 3.6884 trillion won, up 26.2%.
Naver also unveiled a plan to comprehensively upgrade its service structure around AI this year. Starting with the recently introduced shopping agent, it will sequentially roll out vertical AI agents in local (maps and places), finance, and health, and it plans to expand advertising into external media and out-of-home ads by advancing AI solutions such as AD Boost. In Fintech, it will enhance finance and investment functions centered on Naver Pay, and, based on the proposed corporate combination of Naver Financial and Dunamu, it has left open the possibility of expanding into a financial platform that encompasses digital asset.
For commerce, it proposed strengthening delivery competitiveness and expanding membership benefits; for global business, equity investments in webtoon entertainment and collaboration on a new digital comics platform; and for B2B (business-to-business transaction), targeting public, finance, and overseas markets with HyperCLOVA X-based AI, cloud, GPUaaS, and digital twin. Naver made clear that if last year it laid the groundwork for growth centered on AI and commerce, this year it will fully deploy AI agents and expand them across key businesses such as advertising, commerce, finance, and content.
But on site, concerns outweighed expectations. Shareholders, pointing to the sluggish stock rebound despite the earnings improvement and increased dividends, raised doubts about whether expanded investment would translate into a real rise in corporate value. In particular, since a motion to approve the cap on compensation for board directors was also on the agenda, many saw this as putting management compensation ahead of shareholder returns. Naver passed a motion that day to raise the directors' compensation cap from 8 billion won to 10 billion won.
The key agenda item at the meeting was appointing CFO Kim Hee-cheul as an inside director. It is the first time in about 10 years that a CFO has joined Naver headquarters' board since former CFO Hwang In-jun stepped down in 2016. Naver appears to be aiming to strengthen the linkage between financial strategy and board decision-making as AI investment ramps up alongside global business expansion.
The industry interprets the CFO's joining the board as a signal beyond a simple personnel move. With Naver leaving open the possibility of mergers and acquisitions in new business areas such as physical AI and Web3 this year, the move is seen as a bid to directly manage potential financial burdens and investment risks at the board level. An industry official said, "As Naver accelerates investment in AI and new businesses, seating the CFO on the board can be seen as an intention to strengthen financial control."
The push for a corporate combination between Naver Financial and Dunamu is also a major task. Future communication with shareholders and protecting value are likewise expected to be tasks for management. The more aggressively the company pursues investment and business restructuring, the stronger the calls will be to provide explanations and results that the market can accept.
Kim Hee-cheul, newly appointed as an inside director and CFO, met with reporters right after the shareholders meeting and said, "Unlike in the past, the AI era requires discussion across a much broader range of areas. To respond to change, we will actively review all possibilities, including mergers and acquisitions (M&A)," adding, "Regarding the corporate fusion with Dunamu that has drawn market attention, we are discussing various options internally, and it is going well."