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On the night of June 27, 2024, Korea Standard Time, NAVER WEBTOON's parent company, WEBTOON Entertainment, went public on NASDAQ (ticker: WBTN). In a press conference held immediately after the listing, Junkoo Kim Founder and CEO of WEBTOON Entertainment and NAVER WEBTOON, shared his thoughts on the listing and the future direction of the company.

Listing on NASDAQ marks an inflection point for WEBTOON Entertainment, a company that created and nurtured the webtoon industry

In June 2024, WEBTOON went public on NASDAQ (Ticker: WBTN) in the United States. This achievement was the culmination of the company’s efforts over the past 20 years as a pioneer of the mobile vertical scroll web-comic.

WEBTOON service was born out of Junkoo’s passion for comics, storytelling, art and artists. He wanted to see a constant stream of entertaining content at a time when the market for published comics was struggling. Fast forward nearly 20 years, the company is a global success – helping millions of creators connect and share their stories with ~170M readers – and an entertainment powerhouse that is fueling some of the biggest hits across Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other major streamers.

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Unlike 20 years ago, when the term “web-comic” was unfamiliar to most people, the status of the web-comic industry has now risen to the point where web-comic creators are cited as the most coveted profession by teenagers. This year’s listing marks an important inflection point for WEBTOON Entertainment, as it signifies that the competitiveness and growth potential of web-comic has been recognized by global investors.

The “Disney of Asia,” a dream with potential supported by IPs

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WEBTOON Entertainment has claimed that their goal is to become the “Disney of Asia” – but our reach and targets are now even larger as a global company. This is not just a marketing slogan, but a realistic aspiration for creating a company that will be loved for more than 100 years like Disney, by creating steady streams of known IPs* and sharing them with the world. In Korea, we have already built a reputation and an ecosystem of creators to secure a wide range of great IPs, and we are following the same strategy in Japan and the Rest of World to secure properties from various geographies.

*IP: Intellectual property refers to tangible and intangible works created through various activities, such as content.

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Korean WEBTOON series that drew great attention from readers are expanding the possibilities of WEBTOON IPs by producing adaptations such as movies, tv shows, merchandise and games. In the United States, we are collaborating with Wattpad WEBTOON Studios (WWS) to adapt series based on the original WEBTOON series that draw from deep understanding of different cultures, and we are also competing with global content creators with works tailored to the tastes of global content users such as <Sweet Home>, <All of Us Are Dead>, and <The 8 Show>, which is based on <Money Game> and <Pie Game>.

The future of WEBTOON is built on powerful storytelling content

Given five minutes of free time, some people will watch a quick video or play a game on their phone. But if you want to watch content that delivers captivating stories with interesting character arcs in a short amount of time, nothing fills those free minutes quite like web-comic. With these strengths, WEBTOON Entertainment aims to further expand the web-comic market by targeting users looking for short but powerful storytelling content.

The competitiveness of WEBTOON ultimately comes from the diversity of our content. As a company that first created and nurtured the mobile vertical scroll web-comic and platform, we will continue to innovate so that the web-comic industry, which has made its presence known to the larger world, can receive more attention, allowing us to grow into a global storytelling company that brings diverse stories of individual creators to the world with optimal technologies ●