WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. Plans $292 Million IPO for June 27th (WBTN)

WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. (WBTN) is planning to raise $292 million in an IPO on Thursday, June 27th, IPO Scoop reports. The company will issue 15,000,000 shares at $18.00-$21.00 per share.

In the last year, WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. generated $1.3 billion in revenue and had a net loss of $144.8 million. The company has a market cap of $2.5 billion.

WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. provided the following description of their company for its IPO: “WEBTOON is a global storytelling platform where a vibrant community of creators and users discover, create and share new content. (Incorporated in Delaware) We have pioneered a cultural movement by revolutionizing the storytelling format and democratizing content creation and publication. WEBTOON empowers creators by enabling them to participate economically in their own creation, and users, by offering an endless library of content. Our community connects 24 million creators with approximately 170 million monthly active users in over 150 countries around the world.1 Our founder, Junkoo Kim, started WEBTOON in 2005 while he was working as a search engineer at NAVER, the largest Internet company in Korea. Junkoo was a lifelong lover of comics and their rich and vibrant worlds and diverse characters. He wanted to create a platform that empowered creators to share stories and for fans, like himself, to discover this unique content. Instead of a traditional storytelling format, confined to a page or screen, he pioneered something different. Through serialized releases of bite-sized episodes available online, he created a format that was not only easily accessible and highly engaging for fans, but also easier for creators to create and share with a wide audience. WEBTOON initially focused almost entirely on seeding differentiated content and fostering user engagement until we began our Paid Content business model in 2012 and then began operating as an independent unit within NAVER in 2017. Though our roots are in Korea, we have built a truly global platform in the nearly two decades since our founding, broadening the reach and impact of our creators and their content. Creators power our content engine by authoring immersive visual stories, or titles, developing imaginative new characters and inspiring fandoms. Our creator base ranges from the individual enthusiast with a love of storytelling to the professional author building a brand and an enterprise on our platform. WEBTOON provides creators with an opportunity to monetize their creativity through various means, including Paid Content, Advertising and IP Adaptations. Our platform serves both amateur and professional creators. Professional creators are defined as creators who monetize through Paid Content on our platform under formal creator agreements with Paid Content revenue sharing provisions. We consider these two groups of creators separately because their intentions are often distinct. Amateur creators, which make up the vast majority of the 24 million creators on our platform, may come to our platform simply for the love of our unique form of storytelling and to connect with an engaged and like-minded audience. On the contrary, professional creators are often building a brand and an enterprise on our platform. In the year ended December 31, 2023, the average earnings per professional creator on our platform were $48 thousand, with top 100 creators earning an average of $1 million, and, cumulatively, our creators earned over $2.8 billion between 2017 and 2023. Due to the deep and continuous user engagement fostered through our serialized format, content on our platform has greater longevity. Some of the most successful series on our platform continue to attract new users after more than 10 years.  Content on our platform tells stories created by our creators through multiple immersive formats. On our platform, creators tell long-form stories through our iconic serialized narratives in the form of short-form, bite-sized episodes. This content format results in a habitual behavior with an engaged user base. These stories are told primarily in two ways—web-comics, a graphical comic-like medium, and web-novels, which are text-based stories. The web-comic medium tells stories using a continuous vertical-scroll format that is easily read on mobile devices. For both formats, the serialized release of content is analogous to chapters of a book. These formats are not only accessible and highly engaging for fans, but also easier for creators to create, share and monetize their stories. We are able to further extend the reach, impact and monetization of our content by adapting it into other media formats such as film, streaming series, games, merchandise and print books. Over the past decade, we have adapted over 900 titles, including over 100 streaming series and films, more than 200 books, over 70 games and over 11 million consumer product units as of March 31, 2024.   (Note: WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. disclosed the terms for its IPO in an S-1/A filing dated June 17, 2024: The company is offering 15.0 million shares at a price range of $18.00 to $21.00 to raise $292.5 million, if priced at the $19.50 mid-point.)  “.

WEBTOON Entertainment Inc. was founded in 2005 and has 1854 employees. The company is located at 5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 220 Los Angeles, CA 90036 and can be reached via phone at (323) 424-3795 or on the web at https://about.webtoon.com/.