[Click eStock] "Kakao, Expecting Growth in Talk Board Ads... Target Price Raised"

Hana Financial Investment Issues 'Buy' Rating and 280,000 KRW Target Price... Closing Price on 20th at 231,500 KRW

[Asia Economy Reporter Kum Boryeong] An analysis has been presented that shows aggressive expectations for the growth of Kakao Talk Board advertising.

On the 21st, Hana Financial Investment issued a 'Buy' rating for Kakao. The target price was raised from the previous 240,000 KRW to 280,000 KRW. Kakao's closing price on the 20th was 231,500 KRW.

Hwang Seungtaek, a researcher at Hana Financial Investment, stated, "Along with environmental changes including the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) impact and digitalization, traffic on the Kakao platform is increasing, which is a major factor attracting advertisers. There is available advertising inventory, and with the recent increase in small and medium-sized advertisers and the expansion of their performance-based advertising demand, we believe revenue growth will accelerate. In particular, the increase in small and medium-sized advertisers is encouraging from the perspective of a long-term increase in long-tail advertisers, as they use advertising as a sales channel, unlike large advertisers," he explained.

Talk Board, along with commerce, is expected to be a major growth driver for second-quarter earnings improvement. Talk Board advertising is understood to have recovered growth in the second quarter after stagnation in January and February. Researcher Hwang said, "Based on this, unlike the first quarter which maintained the previous quarter's level, we expect KakaoTalk Biz platform advertising revenue in the second quarter to achieve double-digit growth compared to the first quarter, and total Talk Biz revenue is expected to record around 240 billion KRW, an increase of 6.7% compared to the first quarter."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.