SEOUL, November 28 (AJP) - South Korea’s No. 2 portal site Daum will be spun off into a standalone company named AXZ on Dec. 1, marking its first legal separation from Kakao in 11 years in a bid to revive competitiveness in the portal business, industry officials said Friday.
Kakao will transfer Daum’s service rights to AXZ, a subsidiary established in May to prepare for the split. The move ends a decade-long integration following Kakao’s 2014 merger with Daum Communications.
Starting next month, AXZ will operate Daum’s key services, including search, news, shopping, online communities and email. Tistory, the long-running blogging platform, will also be overseen by AXZ under a plan announced last month.
The spin-off is designed to restore agility at Daum, whose development pace slowed under Kakao’s sprawling corporate structure. “The separation will strengthen our portal expertise and create a more flexible environment for experimentation, enabling swift, independent decision-making and new value creation,” a Kakao official said.
Ahead of the transfer, Kakao updated its privacy policy on Nov. 24, removing Daum from its list of data-processing services and deleting related data-collection provisions across Daum pages and customer centers.
Despite the legal separation, the two companies will continue to share certain user data. AXZ will supply Kakao with information from Daum’s integrated search, news consumption patterns and Tistory logs, which Kakao plans to use to improve personalized recommendations and advertising within KakaoTalk. Industry analysts say this reflects the continued need for data synergies across the broader Kakao ecosystem.
Users will also see changes to the login procedure for Daum Games, which is operated by Kakao Games. The unified Daum-Kakao account login system will be revised following the split.
* This article, published by Economic Daily, was translated by AI and edited by AJP.
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