KakaoPage, the webtoon platform from South Korea’s internet giant Kakao Corp., recently acquired a major stake in Indonesian company Neobazar, a company into publishing games and webtoon services.
Indonesia’s leading webtoon platform
Neobazar was started in 2015 and is now Indonesia’s leading online comic service. The platform offers webtoons and web novels. It has become number one paid webtoon service in Indonesia with 1.7 million downloads till date.
Neobazar’s platform also hosts Korean webtoons like “Empress of Another World” and “The Reason Why Raelina Ended up at the Duke’s Mansion,” which are gaining much popularity in Indonesia. The Korean webtoons make 90% of platform’s entire profit.
With this acquisition, KakaoPage sure has a stronghold in the Southeast Asian webtoon market. Indonesia’s smartphone user market is over 100 million, which gives KakaoPage a huge consumer base. The company also has plans to expand to countries like Taiwan and Malaysia.
“This acquisition is the first step for KakaoPage, which has been making efforts to create a Korean content ecosystem in overseas markets, to launch a global business in earnest,” CEO Lee Jin-soo has told to media in a statement.
Opening doors for global expansion
KakaoPage is basically a digital content marketplace launched in 2013. The platform allows brands and individuals to create and distribute visual, audio and written content such as webtoons and genre fiction. KakaoPage has provided content through Tencent in China and Piccoma, a manga subscription service in Japan.
KakaoPage has 960 webtoons, online novels, movies, and dramas, each of which crossed cumulative sales of over US $88,465. Acquiring Neobazar will further the company’s mission to expand and popularise Korean content in the Southeast Asia region and eventually into the global market.
