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NAVER CEO Choi Soo-yeon met with French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to Korea commemorating the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and France. The meeting, arranged at President Macron’s request to directly engage with leaders of major Korean companies, was joined by NAVER CFO Kim Hee-cheol, NAVER Cloud CEO Kim Yu-won, and NAVER LABS CEO Seok Sang-ok. The participants discussed opportunities to expand bilateral cooperation centered on AI.

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NAVER has been building its partnership with France for more than a decade. Since signing the letter of intent with the French government in November 2015, NAVER first expanded its footprint to the European market by becoming the anchor investor of Korelya Capital, established by the former French Minister of Digital Economy Fleur Pellerin, the following year. Afterwards, NAVER went on to acquire “NAVER LABS Europe (previously Xerox Research Centre Europe)” in Grenoble, France, to secure a world-class hub for AI research. In addition, the company has continuously expanded its local technology network by investing early on in companies like “Mistral AI” and “Hugging Face,” which have established themselves as leading AI unicorns in Europe.

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CEO Choi emphasized NAVER’s extensive network in France and the company’s full-stack AI capabilities*, expressing a strong commitment to actively pursue diverse collaboration opportunities with French companies. President Macron shared France’s policy direction to advance France as an AI leader in Europe, expressing his support for deeper technology exchange and partnerships between Korean and French companies around AI and cloud.

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*Full-stack AI: NAVER’s proprietary AI capabilities span from the beginning to the end of everything related to AI technology – from developing LLMs to operating its own data centers and cloud platform, along with providing services for users.

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Based on the company’s experience in France, NAVER aims to expand the scope of AI collaboration to the broader European region. Furthermore, armed with its full-stack AI capabilities that connect technology, infrastructure, and services, NAVER will continue to create collaboration models that fit the characteristics of the industry in each country, while reinforcing its role as a substantive partner in the global AI ecosystem ●

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► Read more on CEO Choi Soo-yeon’s talk on “Diversity and vision of the digital ecosystem expansion enabled by AI” at the Paris AI Action Summit (Link)