– Kakao Entertainment enters the North American market based on tapas and raddish, which has established a strong presence in the United States
– A webtoon platform is scheduled to be launched in Taiwan and Thailand next month, and Kakao Entertainment’s global influence is expected to expand to China and India in the second half of the year .
– Kakao Entertainment, “The acquisition of Tapas and Radish is an opportunity for Kakao Entertainment to evolve as a global content company and will accelerate the expansion of its global platform network this year.”
Kakao Entertainment (CEO Jinsu Lee, Seongsu Kim) held a board meeting on the 7th and decided to acquire North American webtoon platform Tapas Media Inc. (CEO Kim Changwon) and web novel platform Radish Media Inc. (CEO Lee Seungyoon). revealed.
Through this acquisition, Kakao Entertainment (hereinafter referred to as Kakao Entertainment) secured a 100% stake in Tapas. In the case of Radish, more than half of the board of directors has decided to sell the company, and the final acquisition is scheduled to be completed by conducting a tender offer in May. Through this investment, Tapas and Radish were valued at about 600 billion won ($510 million) and 500 billion won ($440 million), respectively. Kakao Entertainment plans to strengthen its global influence by entering the North American market in earnest based on its tapas and radishes, which have established a strong presence in the United States.
Tapas, which Kakao Entertainment has worked hard to acquire for a long time, is the first webtoon platform in North America, established in San Francisco, USA in 2012, and is experiencing explosive upward growth, with sales growing five times in 2020 compared to the previous year. Kakao Entertainment entered the North American market early and continued its cooperative relationship with Tapas, which was servicing webtoons, and incorporated it as an overseas affiliate in November of last year. Since the second half of last year, Kakao Entertainment’s major IPs, such as ‘In-house Confrontation’, ‘Victory’, ‘Incredible Rumors’, and ‘Navillera’, began to be supplied to the North American market through Tapas. Currently, about 80 IPs of Kakao Entertainment supplied to Tapas are driving half of the sales of Tapas, which distributes about 90,000 contents. Tapas not only serves as a logistics base to promote K-webtoons in the North American market, but also actively operates an artist community program called Tapastry and is working on IP development with local writers. In fact, the webtoon ‘The Beginning, Not the End’, developed by Tapas as a local work, has been recognized for its artistic quality and completeness enough to be re-exported to the Kakao Page platform and Japan’s Piccoma.
Radish is a mobile-specific English novel content platform established in New York, USA in 2016. Since 2019, it has been creating hit works with ‘Radish Original’, a self-produced content based on a collective creation system, and has shown rapid growth, with annual sales increasing more than 10 times in 2020. Compared to other platforms that mainly operate for free serials, Raddish has an unrivaled competitive advantage, with 90% of total sales coming from its own original IP. Through this acquisition of Radish, Kakao Entertainment plans to expand K-web novels into the English-American market in earnest, following K-webtoons. Kakao Entertainment’s super IPs, which are the number one web novels in Korea both in name and reality, have been recreated as secondary creations such as webtoons, dramas, and movies, creating numerous box office hits, so expectations are high for the K-web novels that will be introduced through Radish.
Lee Jin-soo, CEO of Kakao Entertainment, said, “Kakao Entertainment has taken another opportunity to evolve into a global content company through the acquisition of Tapas and Radish, and plans to further accelerate the expansion of its global platform network. Last year, we gained confidence in the North American market by seeing the growth in transaction volume clearly reflected as the supply of our IP to Tapas increased. “Through this acquisition, we are exporting web novels to Raddish in earnest, and we expect Kakao Entertainment’s success formula to work in the U.S. as well,” he said. Combined, we have greater competitiveness. In addition, we expect that Tapas CEO Kim Chang-won and Radish CEO Lee Seung-yoon, who entered the U.S. early and established solid leadership, will play a key role in leading the U.S. and global entertainment business.”
With this acquisition, Tapas CEO Kim Chang-won and Radish CEO Lee Seung-yoon will continue to participate as managers of each company and serve as Kakao Entertainment’s GSO (Global Strategy Officer). Based on the experience accumulated in the North American market, it is expected that Kakao Entertainment will expand its capabilities in the global business.
Tapas CEO Kim Chang-won said, “We are happy to join forces with Kakao Entertainment, a large company with the largest number of original content IPs in Korea. In the future, all of Kakao Entertainment’s webtoon IPs will be released through the Tapas platform. Kakao Entertainment and Tapas will expand the mission they have achieved together with existing employees and the local artist community to a larger and more meaningful scale,” he said.
Seungyoon Lee, CEO of Radish Media, said, “To become more competitive in the rapidly growing North American web novel market, we joined hands with Kakao Entertainment, which has been leading the story entertainment market in an innovative way. The original IPs that Radish has produced in-house have secured greater potential by collaborating with Kakao Entertainment, which has a value chain across all areas of the entertainment business, and have also secured greater potential in the North American story market by supplying Korea’s representative super IPs. “We will present stories from a diverse spectrum,” he said.
Kakao Entertainment has focused on securing competitive IP over the past few years. Since the beginning of the business, we have invested approximately 1.5 trillion won in the development of leading domestic content providers (CPs) and IPs, and as a result, we have secured over 8,500 original IPs, the largest in Korea. Based on the IP value chain established in this way, the global platform network is also expanding. Piccoma, which ranked first in sales of comics apps in the world, showed off the power of Kakao in the Japanese market. Kakao Entertainment, which has accelerated its growth in North America with tapas and raddish following Japan, is planning to launch its own platform in the Taiwan and Thailand markets next month. In addition, Kakao’s global influence is expected to expand further as it plans to enter the Chinese and Indian markets, which have the world’s largest populations, in the second half of the year.
Source: Pangyo Techno Valley Official Newsroom
→ Go to ‘Asia Innovation Hub Pangyo Techno Valley 202