Seoul, April 30 (IANS) Naver, South Korea’s largest online portal operator, said Thursday its first-quarter net profit fell 31.3 per cent from a year earlier, weighed down by foreign exchange losses.

Net profit for the three months that ended in March fell to 291 billion won (US$195.9 million) from 423.7 billion won in the same period last year, the company said in a regulatory filing.

“The decline was largely attributed to increased translation losses on the company’s dollar-denominated debt when converted into the local currency,” a company spokesperson said.

Operating profit rose 7.2 percent to 541.8 billion won in the first quarter from 505.3 billion won a year ago. Sales also increased 16.3 percent to 3.24 trillion won from 2.78 trillion won over the same period.

The results fell short of market expectations. The average estimate for net profit stood at 513.7 billion won, according to a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data arm of Yonhap News Agency.

Sales from Naver’s mainstay platform business, which covers search, advertisement and shopping, rose 14.7 percent to 1.8 trillion won from a year earlier.

Its global business, which encompasses online marketplaces and webtoon platforms, saw its first-quarter sales rise 18.4 percent to 941.6 billion won, while the financial platform’s sales expanded 18.9 percent on-year to 459.7 billion won, said the report.

“Naver is a unique platform that integrates search, commerce and payment infrastructure, the core competitive advantages of the AI agent era, into a single ecosystem,” said Choi Soo-yeon, Naver’s chief executive officer (CEO), adding that the company will identify opportunities in global growth areas, such as sovereign AI, to accelerate overall revenue growth.

—IANS

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