Kakao Entertainment is merging three of its subsidiaries — Samyang C&C, Intime and Feelyeon Management — to strengthen the competitiveness of its story intellectual property (IP) business.
The boards of each company approved the three-way merger on the 12th of this month, and the process will be completed within the year, Kakao Entertainment said on the 14th.
The merger combines three wholly owned subsidiaries in which Kakao Entertainment holds a 100% stake, and the combined entity will keep the existing name, Samyang C&C. Cha Sung-taek, CEO of Samyang C&C, will lead the merged company.
Kakao Entertainment said it decided on the merger to strengthen the competitiveness of its story IP and improve management efficiency. The plan is to combine each company's expertise in planning and producing webtoons and web novels, and to advance its "novel comics" capabilities — adapting web novels into webtoons — in order to maximize story IP synergy. The company plans to focus on discovering high-quality IP across a range of genres, including romance, fantasy and martial-arts fiction, to secure mega-IP with strong fandoms and to strengthen its pipeline.
Samyang C&C, Intime and Feelyeon Management are content providers (CPs) for webtoons and web novels, and have shown strength in planning and producing story IP across a wide range of genres, including romance fantasy and traditional martial-arts fiction, as well as in the novel comics space. They have demonstrated know-how across the entire IP business, from discovering new writers to planning, producing and publishing works, developing merchandise, and expanding into secondary creations such as dramas and animation.
One notable example is Samyang C&C's fantasy title "Elqueeness, the Spirit King," a leading success story of novel comics that expanded from a web novel into a webtoon. Since its serialization on KakaoPage and Kakao Webtoon, it has recorded a combined 340 million cumulative views across webtoon and web novel, and it has also gained strong popularity on Japan's Piccoma through Kakao Piccoma.
"Through this three-way merger, we will solidify our story business by planning and discovering competitive IP, and build an IP pipeline with global competitiveness," a Kakao Entertainment official said.
