Kakao posted its highest-ever quarterly results, driven by growth in its advertising and financial businesses. Kakao also unveiled a plan to pursue an artificial intelligence (AI) initiative in the delivery sector in partnership with Coupang Eats.

Kakao said on the 6th that on a consolidated basis for the second quarter, it recorded revenue of 2.0985 trillion KRW and operating profit of 277.0 billion KRW. Compared with the same period last year, revenue rose 9.4% and operating profit 35.9%, both hitting record highs for a quarter. The operating margin was 13.2%, up 2.6 percentage points from a year earlier.

The platform segment lifted results. Platform revenue was 1.2303 trillion KRW, up 16.6%.

Talk Biz revenue was 643.2 billion KRW, up 12.3%. Supported by demand from financial advertisers, revenue from business messages, which are notification-type messages sent by companies, grew 20%, and display ads that use the KakaoTalk interface grew 28% aided by new products. Commerce revenue, including KakaoTalk Gift·Talk Deal, also rose 10.0% year-on-year to 243.2 billion KRW.

Revenue in ‘Other Platform’, which includes Mobility·Pay, increased 21.7% to 587.0 billion KRW. Kakao Mobility saw logistics businesses such as quick service·delivery contribute to revenue growth. Kakao Pay also posted record quarterly revenue, with financial services such as securities and insurance increasing, and the payments business delivering double-digit growth.

By contrast, the content segment rose just 0.7% to 868.2 billion KRW. As user inflows to Piccoma, the Japanese comics platform, slowed, story revenue fell 15.8%.

Net profit was 18.0 billion KRW, down by more than 90%. This reflected a loss from discontinued operations of 180.8 billion KRW due to stake disposals including Kakao Games, as well as corporate tax expenses.

The cumulative number of sign-ups for ‘ChatGPT for Kakao’, which links ChatGPT with KakaoTalk, reached about 13 million in the second quarter, an increase of around 2 million from the first quarter.

On the day, Kakao CEO Jeong Shin-a stated, “The first domain to be linked to the agent AI of Kakao will be food delivery, and we will pursue an AI partnership with Coupang Eats.” Under this approach, AI reads the intent to order from conversational context and suggests menus, and users can complete ordering and payment within a KakaoTalk chatroom without moving to a separate app.

Up to now, KakaoTalk had focused on advancing internal services such as Gift, and it is now embarking on full-fledged collaboration with major external operators. It appears to be a plan to turn KakaoTalk into an ‘execution gateway’ that connects services from multiple providers. Kakao plans to continue increasing partners in high-frequency areas such as commerce·reservations·travel·payments.