NHN adds US-based Cloudnexa as it doubles down on cloud and data business

[Photo provided by NHN Corp.]

South Korea’s leading game and online service provider NHN Corp. has acquired Cloudnexa Inc., an American cloud computing solution management firm, as it targets 1 trillion won ($880 million) revenue within five years through focus on data center, cloud computing, and data management services.

NHN announced Thursday that NHN Global Inc, its subsidiary based in Los Angeles, U.S., acquired Cloudnexa. Based in Philadelphia, Cloudnexa is one of original Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners since 2008 and AWS Premier Partner since 2013.

Price and other details on the acquisition were not disclosed.

On Thursday, shares of NHN finished 0.44 percent lower at 68,000 won.

NHN upon making the acquisition announcement introduced “NHN Cloud,” a new label for its cloud computing service that it has been running under the brand name of “Toast” since 2014. The company has about 3,000 corporate clients using its service.

In addition, it unveiled a new annual sales target of achieving 1 trillion won by 2025. It aims to accomplish the goal by strengthening global service, data center management business and artificial intelligence/data tech solution. Last year, the company generated 160 billion won in sales from the cloud computing service business, up 2.5 times from a year earlier and 40 percent of the total earned from overseas operation.

The company currently is building two new data centers in Korea – one in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province and another one in Gwangju Metropolitan City. Gimhae center is designed to be four times bigger than NHN’s current cloud center in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, and Gwangju center will be the largest in Korea and one of the top 10 of the world.

In addition to the data centers, the company will set up data engineer education center in both Gimhae and Gwangju.

The company will also aggressively seek expansion in the global data solution business market. It has been partnering on data management with Bango, a mobile commerce company in the U.K., in 2019. Together, they established a data center joint venture named Audiens last year for the European market.

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