Joyce Lee and Byungwook kim

SEONGNAM (South Korea) – The new South Korean tech company Naver Corp headquarters is located near Seoul. It looks like a sci-fi movie scene with 40 robots walking across the floors, delivering packages and Starbucks (NASDAQ) coffees to people.

They are also known as Rookies. The robots weave through people, and they even use an elevator that can see through to cross the buildings 28 floors. Naver is critical in that the brains of the Rookies are kept in the cloud, and can be accessed by the robots through a superfast private 5G network.

Although the robots appear to be performing their tasks well, Naver’s senior executives remain cautious about the future commercial viability of its fledgling business. The company has invested $550million in the venture, and 5G technology poses challenges.

“This will be a long-term task,” Seok Sang-ok, CEO of R&D arm Naver Labs, which leads the robots project, told Reuters, declining to make any financial forecasts for the business.

South Korea’s most popular search portal operator Naver, with a value of 35 billion dollars and a top 10 list of companies. The company has made a strong push for 5G and was the first to allow a local licensed network to operate in the country.

Naver’s cautious view for robots business highlights the problems companies face when turning 5G promises into real commercial success.

They include regulatory obstacles relating to new services such as autonomous driving and patchy network rollouts.

Even though South Korea is Asia’s 5G leader, and has just launched the fifth-generation mobile network in 2019, there have not been enough customers. Telecoms were reluctant to make the large investments necessary to improve connection speeds for services like autonomous driving.

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Naver’s robots perform basic functions at the moment and are being tested in controlled conditions. But, Naver executive team is banking on their affordability to be used for more.

Naver did not disclose the price of the robots, however, he said that removing the central processing and graphics unit from the robot, and keeping the “brain”, in the cloud, can lower the unit’s costs by $1,500.

Seok stated that 5G’s low latency was the key to removing computers from robots, so that it can access huge computing power without restriction.

Naver intends to double the robots’ number to 100 by this year. They will also be able to set up and maintain its huge data center, which is expected to complete in 2023. It will be 300,000 sqm and capable of operating at least 100,000 servers. The center is similar in size to Apple (NASDAQ;) or Microsoft (NASDAQ.:).

Although 5G has many benefits, it must be optimized for robots and not phones. Won Choonglyol from Naver Labs said in an interview that “No one can do this, but we’re doing it.”

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