Naver Webtoon is in talks with several global investors to attract up to $400 million before its planned Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.
The company sought large overseas institutional investors and ended up choosing a foreign investment bank as its financial adviser. Naver Webtoon hopes to strike partnerships with global and strategic investors to get a better offering price when it debuts on the U.S. stock market.
Naver Webtoon was spun off from its parent company Naver in 2017. Since then, Naver Webtoon has been expanding its business focusing on global contents especially in North America.
Last year, the webtoon firm reorganized the governance structure of its global webtoon business under a U.S.-based corporation aiming to go public there. Earlier, Naver listed its content subsidiary ― Line Corporation ― on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Naver Webtoon’s enterprise value is currently estimated at 5 trillion won. Annual sales have soared by four times in three years to 132.2 billion won last year from 34 billion won in 2017.
Last month, Naver acquired Canada’s No.1 web novel platform Wattpad to expand its reach in the global content market. The IT giant spent $600 million to defeat competitors like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Facebook and Spotify to acquire a 100 percent stake in Wattpad.
Wattpad is the world’s biggest social story telling platform that attracts 90 million monthly active users (MAU). Naver Webtoon has 72 million MAU on its platform, which adds up to 160 million MAU when combined with Wattpad. This made Naver Webtoon simultaneously the biggest webtoon and web novel platforms in the world. Recently, Naver Webtoon acquired over a 25 percent stake in the global webtoon platform Tappytoon, spending some 33.5 billion won.
Webtoon and web novel businesses are important for Naver as it wants to create original content based on popular pieces that have already displayed massive appeal online.
In 2017, Naver Webtoon invested in establishing the web drama producer Playlist, together with Snow, another Naver affiliate operating a multimedia mobile application as well as image messaging.
Playlist’s hit-TV dramas include “Love Playlist,” “Eighteen” and “XX.” The production company also scouted popular TV series director Yoon Hyun-ki from Studio Dragon, a drama production company under CJ ENM.
