Choi Soo-yeon

The Harvard Law–trained Choi took over Korea’s largest internet search company in March 2022 with ambitions and the M&A know-how to make the “Google of South Korea”—as it is often called—a global business. She arrived at the top spot at a tough moment for Naver, as the company faced government scrutiny for its market dominance and internal soul-searching over its work culture following the suicide of one of the company’s engineers. Meanwhile, Naver was losing share—from 79% in 2016 to 62.2% in 2022—to Google. Choi has responded with some big swings: She acquired the U.S. fashion resale platform Poshmark in January for $1.2 billion, less than half its IPO price, and in August released a generative AI tool to compete with the likes of ChatGPT. Naver, which runs a locally licensed 5G network, is also betting big on robotics; at Naver’s headquarters in Seoul, robots known as Rookies zoom around, supporting the human workforce. The company took in $6.5 billion in revenue in 2022, up 20.6% from the previous year.