{"id":129003,"date":"2026-08-23T04:49:41","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T04:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/129003\/"},"modified":"2026-08-23T04:49:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T04:49:41","slug":"naver-shares-struggle-despite-record-earnings-as-labor-tensions-mount","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/129003\/","title":{"rendered":"Naver shares struggle despite record earnings as labor tensions mount"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Naver's Naver’s search page. [Park Hye-rim] <\/p>\n

Naver, once hailed as a bargain buy among leading IT stocks, is struggling to gain traction in the market. Despite posting record earnings, its share price has failed to recover, while labor tensions between the company and its affiliates are intensifying.<\/p>\n

Naver shares briefly surged to nearly 280,000 won ($198) when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited the company’s headquarters, but have since slipped back to the 210,000 won range. At one point, some predicted the stock could climb to 1 million won, but it has yet to break out of the low 200,000 won range.<\/p>\n

Naver’s union has announced plans to formally pursue “consolidated bargaining” this month \u2014 a unified negotiating framework covering both the parent company and its affiliates. The push has emerged as a key variable for the share price, with Naver Z on the verge of what could be the company’s first-ever strike after its workers voted to authorize industrial action.<\/p>\n

According to Korea Exchange, Naver closed Wednesday up 0.93 percent from the previous session at 216,000 won. The stock has edged up for three consecutive sessions since Monday, buoyed by the company’s record quarterly sales of 3.39 trillion won for the second quarter, but it remains about 22.6 percent below the roughly 280,000 won level it reached in June when Huang visited South Korea \u2014 a drop over approximately two months.<\/p>\n

Industry watchers say the escalating labor dispute is the biggest risk factor for the stock. Naver’s union held a forum at the National Assembly on Wednesday to formally announce its push for consolidated bargaining. The initiative aims to bring wage and working-condition negotiations \u2014 which currently vary by affiliate depending on each unit’s financial situation and bargaining power \u2014 to a single group-level table.<\/p>\n

\"Lee Lee Moon-ho, director of the Work-In Organizational Innovation Institute, speaks at a forum on building a consolidated bargaining structure for the IT sector, held Wednesday at the National Assembly’s Second Conference Room in Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul. <\/p>\n

At the forum, Naver’s union accused management of forcing individual-unit bargaining. Shin Hwan-seop, chairman of the Chemical and Food Workers’ Union, said subsidiaries had been compelled to go through a year of nominal negotiations even though “there is nothing a subsidiary can do without a decision from the parent company.”<\/p>\n

The union also said individual bargaining generates unnecessary costs. Oh Se-yun, deputy chairman of the union’s Naver chapter, said the chapter currently covers 28 legal entities and 6,200 workers, and has signed collective agreements with 15 companies including Naver itself, with negotiations ongoing with one more. “We have to conduct separate wage negotiations with 16 entities every year \u2014 that amounts to about 150 rounds of bargaining annually, with labor and management representatives each spending more than 1,000 hours a year,” he said.<\/p>\n

The union also argued that Naver is the de facto employer, given that it holds majority stakes in most of its key affiliates. Oh said Naver owns 100 percent of Naver Cloud and Naver Labs, 90 percent of Snow, and 89 percent of Naver Financial.<\/p>\n

He added that Naver executives hold concurrent positions at some affiliates, and that a significant portion of subsidiaries’ sales depends on Naver’s services.<\/p>\n

The union plans to hold a formal launch event for the consolidated bargaining drive at noon on Aug. 20.<\/p>\n

\"Oh Oh Se-yun, deputy chairman of the Chemical and Food Workers’ Union’s IT committee and head of its Naver chapter, speaks at the forum. <\/p>\n

Adding to the pressure, the prospect of a first-ever strike at a Naver affiliate has drawn attention for its potential impact on the share price.<\/p>\n

The union at Naver Z, which operates the metaverse platform Zepeto, recently held a strike authorization vote among its members and passed it with 98 percent in favor. The specific form and timing of any industrial action will be determined based on how negotiations with management proceed.<\/p>\n

Naver Z’s labor and management had earlier failed to narrow their differences during this year’s wage negotiations. Management proposed a wage freeze, citing deteriorating business conditions, while the union is demanding a 5.3 percent raise \u2014 the same rate applied at Naver’s headquarters.<\/p>\n

chami@heraldcorp.com<\/p>\n

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Naver’s search page. [Park Hye-rim] Naver, once hailed as a bargain buy among leading IT stocks, is struggling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[623],"tags":[657],"class_list":["post-129003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-naver","tag-naver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}