The first company Google bought in Korea - TNC

These days, It is quite easy to find that global IT companies bought Korean companies. I posted that EA Korea has acquired Korean Game Developer named J2M. Also last month US Media company, Lifetime Networks acquired Roiworld(www.roiworld.com) which is famous for its fashion game targeting teenager girls.

Recently the hottest issue in Korean M&A market was that Google acquired Korean Blog Developer, TNC on September. TNC is the first company that Google acquired in Korea.

TNC is Blog Developer founded in 2005. It started open source blog publishing application called Tatter Tools, now it is changed its name to Textcube(textcube.org). About 1,500 developers are participating for Textcube’s development through Tatter Network Foundation. Also It launched membership blog service, Titory(www.tistory.com) with Daum, Korean #2 Internet Portal, and blog media site Eolin(www.eolin.com) in 2006. Now Tistory is ranked #1 for its unique visitor among blog services in Korea and ranked as #8 among all domains in Korea.

Then why Google acquired TNC ? It is not that obvious, but in my opinion, Google Korea seemed to want to localize its service more in Korea market. Korea is one the countries that Google is not #1, many Koreans pointed the reason for Google Korea’s failure to localization. Also another reason for acquisition might be the people in TNC, there were outstanding developers in TNC. Google Korea might want to hire them through acquisition. Still Google Korea has not announced that what they will gonna do with TNC’s resources in detail, but I think that this acquisition would be the plus point for Google Korea.