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Q4 2024 Webtoon Entertainment Inc Earnings Call

In This Article:

Participants

Soohwan Kim; Vice President of Investor Relations; Webtoon Entertainment Inc

Junkoo Kim; Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of the Board; Webtoon Entertainment Inc

David Lee; Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Board Member; Webtoon Entertainment Inc

Mark Mahaney; Analyst; Evercore

Eric Sheridan; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Benjamin Black; Analyst; Deutsche Bank

Doug Anmuth; Analyst; JP Morgan

Morgan Stanley; Analyst; Matthew Cost

Andrew Marok; Analyst; Raymond James

Presentation

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Dustin, and I will be your conference operator today.
At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Webtoon Entertainment fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call.
(Operator Instructions)
This time I would now like to turn the call over to Suwon Kim, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Kim, please go ahead.

Soohwan Kim

Good afternoon.
Thank you for joining us. As a reminder, our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, expected performance, in particular our guidance for the next quarter. Actual results may vary materially from statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results differs, including our SEC filings, including those stated in the risk factors session of our filings with the SEC.
These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements. Additionally, the matters we discussed today will include both GAAP and non-gap financial measures. Reconciliation of any non-gap financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are set forth in our earnings press release. Non-gap financial measures should be considered in addition to that as a substitute for GAAP measures. Joining us today on the call are Cheng Gu Kim, founder and CEO, David Lee, CFO and COO, and Yongsu Kim, Chief Strategy Officer. With that, I will now turn the call over to our founder and CEO Chen Gu Kim.

Junkoo Kim

Thank you everyone for joining us today. I'll make a few brief comments on our performance and then David will provide more detail on our research and on.
For my first thought on the year and our path forward, please refer to the shareholder letter posted on our investor relations website. 2024 was an important year for.
We became a public company, making the beginning of an exciting new chapter in our history, and our creators and IP continued to grow their influence all over the world.
I'm pleased to share that we reported strong for year 2024 with record annual revenue and profitability.
Revenue of $1.35 billion dollar grew 5% on a reported basis and 13% on a constant crisis basis.
While we reported a net loss of $153 million mostly due to non-cash expenses, we reported a record adjusted of $67.9 million on an increase of more than 600% compared to 2023. We believe these measures demonstrate that our strategy and flywheel are working.
I'd like to share a few highlights from 2024 starting with the progress of our business in Japan.
By leveraging our leading position in Korea and our successful and differentiated cross border strategy, we will be able to take the top position in Japan for the second half of 2024 as measured by revenue in the non-game market. After successfully exposing a number of our his Korean contents to Japan.
Including stories like teenage mercenary. We are now focused on building a powerful local creative ecosystem in the market.
In January, we invested in number 9, a Japanese studio that has produced the titles such as our global hit Savior of the Divine Blood, which was La Manga's first web comic to become a breakout hit both in and out of Japan.
Our investment in 9 will boost our content pipeline in Japan, the company's largest geography and the fastest growing market.
Further, our indigen amateur platform in Japan is helping us discover local creators and maintain a pipeline of fresh new content.
Zampa is an autohoon. It was discovered through Inde and was developed into a successful cultural anime series in 2024.
With its continued popularity, this title has since been adapted into a new animated feature film by Elex.
Our incredible success in Japan is evidence of the power of our strategy.
We are taking similar actions at various stages in the US and the other key markets, investing in content studios and creators to build our global content pipeline.
Finishing up with the IP adaptations, we had a number of successful launches in Q4, and we are off to a great start in 2025.
Three examples of this include, first, Zhang yuanyi, the Star is Born in Korea was ranked 6th in Disney Plus global TV show category in November.
Second, over the US Thanksgiving weekend, we launched sidelined the QB and me.
The project was instant heat, reaching 1 on TB in the US and Canada during the biggest number of years of any title on TB in its 1st 7 days.
Its success has already led to a green light for a sequel.
And finally, in January, the drama called Heroes onco debuted on Netflix as a global string hit, spending 4 weeks in the stream of TOP10 non-English categories.
We intentionally built our global IP and create an ecosystem to develop titles that can find a variety of audience across formats.
We believe these successes will continue to drive new users to our platform as viewers seek out the original source material for these adaptations.
In conclusion, our success in 2024 was driven by our passionate and dedicated community of creators and users who continue to create, share, and enjoy stories on our platform.
I also want to thank our employees for their continued commitment to our company and our mission.
Looking to 2025, I remain confident in our ability to continue driving innovation with bold new initiative to grow our business and ecosystem as we continue to democratize storytelling by bringing comics a new form of visual storytelling to the creator economy.
With that, I will now turn the call over to David. David, please go ahead.