When I wake in the morning, still under the covers, I reach out and pick up my phone. And almost without thinking, I tap the yellow icon. I check the few messages that arrived overnight, then open the green search window and skim the weather and the news. At some point this sequence became fixed. I have no memory of deciding it; it had simply become so.
In the previous two stories I wrote about walls that others built for their occupants. Inside the wall the state built with law lived Kangwon Land and KT&G; inside the wall nature built with its own logic lived KEPCO and Korea Gas Corporation. Today's wall is a little different. It was built neither by the state nor by nature. It was built by none other than us. By our habit of tapping the same icons every morning, without a thought.
Habit is a strange building material. Unlike brick or the language of statutes, it cannot be held in the hand or seen with the eye. And yet certain habits, as tens of millions of people repeat the same motion at the same hour, become astonishingly solid walls. The two companies living inside that wall are Kakao and Naver. A wall we ourselves raise another course higher, every single morning.
A Wall That Stands Because Nobody Leaves First
KakaoTalk's monthly users in Korea number about 48.19 million. The country's population is a little over 52 million, so once you set aside newborns and the very old, effectively the entire nation uses it. Numbers like this are not common. Not even Kangwon Land or KT&G ever covered a country this completely.
The interesting part is why this wall stands. The reason I cannot leave KakaoTalk is not that KakaoTalk is especially better than other messengers. It is simply that all my friends are there. And my friends cannot leave for exactly the same reason. Their friends are there. In the end, nobody uses the app because they particularly want it; everybody stays together because nobody leaves first. The difficult term for this is network effects. I would rather call it the comfort of being locked in together.
It looks like the sturdiest wall in the world. Look a little closer, though, and curious cracks begin to show.
| Indicator (2025, consolidated) | Figure | A note in passing |
|---|
| Revenue | approx. 8,099.1 billion won | First time past 8 trillion; all-time high (+3%) |
| Operating profit | approx. 732 billion won | All-time high (+48%) |
| KakaoTalk domestic MAU | approx. 48.19 million | About 94% of the population; effectively the whole nation |
| Annual commerce transaction volume | approx. 10.6 trillion won | +6% |
In 2025, Kakao's revenue passed 8 trillion won for the first time, and its operating profit hit an all-time high of 732 billion won. Dazzling, at a glance. Look inside, though, and a somewhat different picture emerges. Revenue grew a mere 3%, while operating profit jumped 48%. What does that mean? It means the money did not come from new customers. Because there are no new customers left to be had. When 94% of the population is already using you, where on earth would you bring more people in from? So instead of adding people, Kakao turned toward collecting a little more from the people already inside the wall. It runs more ads, encourages more gift-giving, and sets things to buy in every corner of the screen.
Outside the wall, things are not what they used to be either. KakaoTalk's overseas users — the ones who were once going to carry it out into the world — have instead fallen 17% over the past five years. At home, however thoroughly the app gets overhauled, the user count barely stirs. It neither grows nor shrinks. Meanwhile, people's time leaks away, little by little, to other places. To YouTube, to Instagram, into short videos a few seconds long. The wall is as high as ever, but the time spent inside it is not as long as it once was.
A Wall Whose Height Nobody Knows
Naver's wall stands on the habit called search. The habit of opening the green window first, whenever you wonder about something. This habit, too, is old, and still firm. But this wall has a curious feature that Kakao's does not. Its height, in truth, is known exactly to no one.
By one measure, based on domestic data, Naver's share of search in 2025 comes out to 62.9%. Google, at just over 30%. A cheerful story of recovering the 60% line for the first time in three years. But by another measure, based on the flow of the worldwide web, Google is said to have overtaken Naver for the first time in some month of that same year. Google 52%, Naver 38%. The same search market in the same country, and depending on whom you ask, Naver is either the overwhelming number one or a number two being pushed aside. Because the wall of habit is invisible, everyone who comes to measure its height brings a different ruler.
| Indicator (2025, consolidated) | Figure | A note in passing |
|---|
| Revenue | approx. 12,035 billion won | All-time high (+12.1%) |
| Operating profit | approx. 2,208.1 billion won | +11.6% |
| Search Platform revenue | approx. 4,168.9 billion won | +5.6% (search, the main house) |
| Commerce revenue | approx. 3,688.4 billion won | +26.2% (a new room built onto search) |
Here is where Naver parts ways with Kakao. If Kakao is squeezing money out of a wall that has stopped growing, Naver has been busily building new rooms on top of its old wall of search. In 2025 Naver's revenue passed 12 trillion won, an all-time high, and most of that growth came not from search itself but from the things attached alongside it. Commerce revenue grew a full 26% in a single year. People come in to search, and while they are at it, they buy things and make payments and read webtoons. Once a person has crossed the threshold called search, Naver rarely lets them back out.
And lately, artificial intelligence has been added to all this. Naver says that more than half of its 2025 growth in advertising and commerce came thanks to AI. Onto the old habit of search, it is fitting new pillars made of new technology. Nobody knows how long the wall will hold, so it looks like someone determined to build, while it holds, everything that can be built on top of it.
The Walls We Build, We Tear Down Ourselves
Three walls in, I begin to see that walls have temperaments of their own.
A wall the state builds, the state tears down; a wall nature builds hardly ever falls. No reason to lay a second power grid is ever going to appear. But a wall built by habit is a little different. It looks the tallest, and it is in fact the most precarious. A wall someone else built, someone else can tear down — but a wall we built, we can tear down ourselves. And very quietly, at that. All it would take is one morning when tens of millions of hands reach out and begin tapping a different icon.
That will not happen tomorrow, of course. Habit is heavy, and 48 million people rarely change direction all at once. But the time spent inside the wall is shortening bit by bit; there is no one left outside to come in; and the rulers measuring the wall's height have started returning different answers. These small signals, Kakao and Naver know better than anyone. That is why the two companies keep building, without pause, new rooms called advertising and commerce and AI on top of the main houses called messaging and search. The wall itself earns no money. Messages are free, and so is search. The money is only ever made after you have kept people inside the wall.
This morning, once again, I tapped the yellow icon and the green one. Tomorrow morning I probably will too. Only now I know that this one absent-minded motion of the hand is, in fact, the laying of one more brick on the walls of two enormous companies. Every morning, with our own hands, we build a little higher the walls that hold us in. And someday, when those walls are torn down, it will be the same hands that do it.
High Pay, Short Tenure
This wall of habit, however, works a little differently on the people employed inside it.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Naver | 5,047 | approx. 146 million won | 7.7 years | approx. 2.38 billion won | approx. 440 million won |
| Kakao | 3,922 | approx. 109 million won | 6.3 years | approx. 2.07 billion won | approx. 190 million won |
Pay at both companies tops 100 million won, enough to earn them the ‘workplace of the gods’ label, but average tenure, at six to eight years, is less than half that of the companies we saw earlier. The wall is high, yet people pass in and out of it often. That is the metabolism of the developer world, where people move from company to company in search of better terms. A wall built of habit holds its consumers for a long time; the people who actually build it, it cannot hold nearly so long.
The next story is about the fourth kind of wall. This time it is a wall built not by one company but by a few companies joining hands. Why the phone bill in our hands always comes out about the same — the quiet equilibrium of the three mobile carriers.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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