[Featured Stock] Mr. Blue, Kakao Entertainment's 20 Trillion Won Outlook Sparks Webtoon Platform Revaluation Expectations

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyungsoo Park] As the reevaluation trend of webtoon platform value continues, Mister Blue's stock price is showing strength.

At 1:06 PM on the 13th, Mister Blue was trading at 12,000 KRW, up 8.6% from the previous day.

Kakao's content subsidiary Kakao Entertainment (hereinafter Kakao Enter) announced plans for an IPO.

Jinsu Lee, CEO of Kakao Enter, said the day before, "Coupang's (New York Stock Exchange listing) success has given hope that Korean companies with global potential like Kakao Enter can receive much better evaluations than before."

Regarding the speculation of a U.S. New York Stock Exchange listing, he introduced, "Since Coupang raised $4.6 billion (about 5 trillion KRW) on the NYSE, we are also considering listing here."

He expressed expectations that Kakao Enter's corporate value, covering digital content including webtoons, web novels, movies, music, and videos, could exceed $17.8 billion (about 20 trillion KRW). CEO Lee said, "Our goal is to build our webtoon platform in every country in every language," adding, "We have currently reached about 10% of that goal."

Mister Blue operates in the digital comics, webtoon, and web novel online content supply business. It acquires comprehensive copyrights and exclusive publishing rights and produces original content using its own IP. To create IP convergence and complex content business, on October 12, 2018, it spun off its game division to establish Blue Potion Games Co., Ltd.

Mister Blue introduced that based on its excellent proprietary platform and the largest number of comic copyrights in Korea, it can actively change the composition of services and content provided in the future to differentiate itself from other service providers. The repurchase rate of existing subscribers is rising, and new subscribers are continuously increasing. The cumulative number of members has grown at an average annual rate of 18% over three years, and as of last year, it has more than 5.86 million members.

The webtoon platform is a unique Korean model that not only distributes comic content but also connects to secondary copyrights and sales of additional products, leading to growth in the intellectual property industry. The National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) forecasted that the digital comics market size will grow from $912 million (about 1.02 trillion KRW) in 2017 to $1.345 billion (about 1.6482 trillion KRW) in 2022.

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