The move marks a wholesale reversal for the internet giant, which has long relied on outside partners to store, haul and deliver merchants' goods while focusing on search traffic and marketplace technology.
According to industry officials, Naver is scouting warehouse sites on both sides of the Han River, weighing land purchases, acquisitions of existing fulfillment centers and long-term leases across the greater Seoul area.
The timing is difficult to overlook.
Coupang, whose Rocket Delivery service transformed Korean ecommerce and built a logistics moat rivals have struggled to cross, is navigating one of the most challenging periods in its history following the country's largest-ever personal data breach.
South Korea's privacy watchdog imposed a record 624.7 billion won ($415.6 million) fine on June 11 after determining that a breach exposed the personal information of more than 33 million accounts—roughly two-thirds of the country's population and nearly all of Coupang's users.
"This was not advanced hacking but negligent management," PIPC Chairperson Song Kyung-hee said, citing the company's failure to maintain basic security safeguards.
The controversy has also spilled into Washington.
Earlier this year, U.S. investors Greenoaks and Altimeter petitioned for a Section 301 trade investigation before withdrawing the request as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative considered a broader review of South Korea's digital trade practices.
More importantly for competitors, the fallout is beginning to show up in business performance.
Coupang posted its first monthly decline in domestic sales in eight years last month, suggesting the prolonged controversy may finally be denting consumer momentum.
Into that opening steps Naver.
For years, the company sought to counter Rocket Delivery without pouring billions into warehouses.
It instead built the Naver Fulfillment Alliance in 2020 with CJ Logistics before adding fulfillment startups such as Fassto and Pumgo. Sellers chose logistics partners while Naver supplied the shoppers, shopping algorithms and promised delivery dates.
The asset-light model kept costs low and allowed rapid expansion without owning a single warehouse.
But as delivery itself became the product, its biggest strength increasingly became its biggest weakness.
Shipping cut-off times, inventory placement, returns and delivery quality are ultimately decided on the warehouse floor—and Naver never owned the floor.
The ecommerce leader has invested more than 10 trillion won in nine mega fulfillment centers and 227 delivery camps, layering automation onto a nationwide logistics network that competitors have struggled to replicate.
Naver now appears to have concluded that algorithms alone are no longer enough.
The urgency is also reflected in its own business.
Commerce revenue more than tripled to 3.69 trillion won in 2025 from 1.09 trillion won in 2020, lifting the segment's contribution to more than 30 percent of total revenue.
Yet investors remain unconvinced. Naver trades at roughly one times book value, suggesting the market assigns little premium to one of Korea's largest internet platforms despite its dominance in search, payments, content and ecommerce.
"We are also actively reviewing direct investment models in logistics," Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon said during the company's first-quarter earnings call, adding the company would decide after weighing lower per-delivery costs against the value of logistics data.
Industry observers believe the strategy could eventually extend beyond warehouses to the last mile itself, with Naver fielding its own couriers—a counterpart to Coupang's in-house "Coupang Friends."
For now, Naver is stopping short of confirming such ambitions.
But the strategic direction is unmistakable.
For 25 years, Naver believed ecommerce could be won without owning logistics. Now it is preparing to invest in the very infrastructure that made Coupang the country's dominant online retailer.
If the plans materialize, they would represent more than a new logistics investment. They would amount to Naver abandoning one of its longest-held strategic assumptions—and taking the fight directly onto Coupang's turf.
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