Naver to buy US second-hand retailer Poshmark for $1.2 billion

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Naver to buy US second-hand retailer Poshmark for $1.2 billion

South Korean internet giant Naver has agreed to buy Poshmark, a popular secondhand retailer in the United States, for $1.2 billion. It is Naver's largest acquisition to date and shows the company's broadening global ambitions.

Naver is a wide-ranging internet services provider that began as a search engine before expanding into email, messaging, news aggregation and e-commerce. Naver's acquisition of Poshmark gives the South Korean tech giant a sizable foothold in the North American resale industry. The parent company of the popular messaging app Line, along with SoftBank, had already expanded into Japan and other markets in the region.

Naver has set its sights beyond Asia. In 2021, it acquired its first North American business, Wattpad, a Toronto company that offers a platform for reading and writing original stories, for $600 million. In 2017, it acquired Xerox Research Center Europe, a France-based center focused on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.