SEOUL, Aug. 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, said Thursday its second-quarter net profit fell 68 percent from a year earlier due to a base effect. Kakao logged a net profit of 101.2 billion won (US$77.2 million) on a consolidated basis in the three months ending [...]
SEOUL, July 13 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Corp., operator of South Korea’s most popular messaging app KakaoTalk, has decided to remove an external payment link from the Android version of the software, following a standoff with Google over the U.S. tech giant’s new in-app payment policy, sources said Wednesday. The standoff between the two companies [...]
SEOUL, July 12 (Korea Bizwire) — A push by Kakao Corp. to sell part of its shares of Kakao Mobility Corp. to a private equity fund has drawn strong protest from its labor union, which criticized the South Korean tech giant for neglecting its corporate social responsibility. Kakao, which currently owns a 57.5 percent stake [...]
SEOUL, June 22 (Korea Bizwire) — LG Electronics Inc. said Wednesday it is joining hands with Kakao Mobility Corp., the country’s leading taxi-hailing firm, to develop mobility-related technologies and services, as the tech giant has been aggressively pushing to expand its business with the next growth engine. The two tech firms recently signed a memorandum [...]
SEOUL, June 8 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Corp., operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, has kept in place an external payment link in the Android version of the popular messaging software against Google’s new in-app payment policy. In April, Google required all app developers selling digital goods and services on the company’s Play [...]
SEOUL, May 4 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, said Wednesday its first-quarter net profit jumped by more than fivefold from a year earlier, due to one-off gains from the disposal of its stocks in a local crypto exchange operator. Net income reached 1.32 trillion won (US$1 [...]
SEOUL, April 20 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Brain, an artificial intelligence (AI) unit of South Korean tech giants Kakao Corp., said Tuesday it had unveiled an AI model designed to create images from text descriptions through the open-source community GitHub. The RQ-Transformer, consisting of 3.9 billion parameters, is a text-to-image AI model that learned 30 [...]
SEOUL, April 13 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea’s financial regulator on Wednesday approved a digital insurance business by Kakao Corp. in a move that could heat up competition in the fledging digital insurance market. The Financial Services Commission (FSC) made the decision, saying the operator of the country’s leading mobile messenger KakaoTalk has satisfied all [...]
SEOUL, April 6 (Korea Bizwire) — Kakao Corp., the operator of South Korea’s top mobile messenger KakaoTalk, said Wednesday it will spend 300 billion won (US$246 million) over the next five years to support small business partners. The project, as part of its long-term strategy named Beyond Korea, is aimed at assisting business owners so [...]
SEOUL, March 25 (Korea Bizwire) — The Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL), a state-run railway operator, said Thursday it will share important information on subway train operations with KakaoMetro subway navigation app starting from Thursday. In case subway train operations are suspended due to accidents or natural disasters, KORAIL will provide emergency notice on the affected [...]