NHN Q1 net up 13.4 pct on ads sales

SEOUL, May 19 (Yonhap) -- NHN Corp., the operator of South Korea's most-visited Web search engine, said Thursday that its first-quarter earnings rose 13.4 percent from a year ago, helped by increased advertisement revenue. Net profit stood at 127.2 billion won (US$116.9 million) in the January-March period, compared with 112.2 billion won a year ago, the company said in a regulatory filing. Sales expanded 14.3 percent on-year to 517.3 billion won in the three-month span and operating profit also rose 13.7 percent to 168.5 billion won, it said. The operator of the Naver search engine said revenue from keyword advertising rose 23.7 percent from a year earlier and display advertising sales for presenting ads on Naver.com also went up 18.3 percent. Naver is a Web portal with a vast array of content from email service, news, online shopping, games, blogs, entertainment and stocks. In April, NHN and its smaller rival Daum Communications Corp. filed an antitrust complaint against Google Inc., accusing the U.S. search engine of limiting the ability to install rivals' search engines on Android-based smartphones. NHN faces growing competition from the U.S. search engine giant, which holds a negligible market share in the Web-based search market, as more users use smartphones rather than personal computers as a gateway to the Internet. The company said that it will continue releasing more sophisticated mobile services for users and add new online game genres to its service.