WEBTOON goes public today – will Wall St. keep scrolling?

Details of WEBTOON’s long planned IPO were announced yesterday, with a target of raising $315 million. And today, the stocks begin to trade on NASDAQ, under the ticker symbol WBTN.

According to Yahoo Finance, WEBTOON is offering 15 million shares at a price between $18 to $21, the top of the range, with major investor BlackRock Inc. coming in for as many as $50 million in shares.

The big day for WEBTOON will be marked in NYC by a big event, dubbed TOON SQUARE, at, where else, Times Sq. from 9 am to noon, with some major webtoon creators signing from 10-12 and a cosplay meet and greet. (Yes, The Beat will be there.) Webtoon founder Junkoo Kim, who came up with the idea for the site while on a break from coding, is expected to be doing some personal appearances as well. 

You’ve been pleading. You’ve been begging…WEBTOON is going to New York–to hang out with YOU!

RSVP to meet fans, Creators, and cosplayers ➡️ https://t.co/GfN6TG4UPK pic.twitter.com/7NJerYCKWs

— WEBTOON (@webtoonofficial) June 14, 2024

The company, valued at $2.7 billion, is owned by Korean tech giant Naver, which will own more than 60% of the company’s shares. Tokyo-based LY Corp. owns another 25%. The company is already well known in the US for its popular webtoon (vertical scrolling comics) content, but other business include Line Manga, a Japanese based webtoon platform, and the web-novel platform Wattpad (disclosure: a frequent advertiser on this site.)

As we’ve mentioned here many times over the years, the plan to go public in the US has been in the works for a while:

Naver, which provides online services from search and shopping to social media, had considered listing the Webtoon business since 2021, around the time the novel medium began to catch on in major markets such as the US. Today, webtoons are considered one of South Korea’s more successful cultural exports alongside K-pop and drama series, driving business for Naver and rival Kakao Corp.

Investor websites haven’t gone nuts for WEBTOON’s offering – a net loss of $145 million last year is a bit of a buzzkill. But major players Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Evercore Inc are all involved in the offering.

Among the pluses for the investor set: mentions of the use of AI in the future, and the thousands and thousands of different intellectual properties that company has a stake in.

Webtoons/vertical scrolling comics are an increasingly popular comics format here in the US and worldwide, particularly among Gen Z  readers –  although there have been setbacks.  In Korea, webtoon readership is feeling the pinch from TikTok and YouTube. But that comes in a country where webtoons are consumed by nearly everyone already.

The US has been a target for new readers for both Webtoon and major rival Kakao/Tapas for years. And with WEBTOON’s IPO, they hope to gain investment dollars as well. Will this be the beginning of a new age for webtoons in the US? Or a big meh? One thing’s for sure: we’ll have lots and lots of business filings to pore over!

[This story has been corrected to say that WBTN will be listed on NASDAQ, but the NYSE. IT has also been updated to more accurately reflect WEBTOON’s stake in the IP on the platform.]