Webtoon shares surged after an expanded tie-up with Disney. This is what you could know.
Shares of Webtoon Leisure (WBTN 39.17%) skyrocketed on Tuesday, peaking with a 42.5% one-day achieve simply after midday ET. The corporate simply expanded its partnership with Walt Disney (DIS -0.25%), considerably boosting the enterprise worth of the Webtoon digital comics platform.
Picture supply: Getty Photos.
Disney is again with an even bigger deal
A few month in the past, on Aug. 12, Webtoon struck up an settlement with the Home of Mouse. That deal concerned about 100 hand-picked comics from the worlds of Star Wars, Spider-Man, Avengers, Alien, and the core Disney storytelling model. Buyers have been fast to embrace that announcement, which is straightforward to search out on Webtoon’s three-month inventory chart.
Immediately’s Disney deal builds on the sooner contract. Now, the 2 corporations are working up a much wider digital comics presentation with greater than 35,000 titles from Disney’s comic-book worlds. Many of those tales haven’t been accessible in digital type earlier than, and Disney will develop just a few completely authentic titles for this platform.
Webtoon’s content material catalog simply bought a Hulk-sized adrenaline shot. On the identical time, a ton of not often seen Disney content material ought to discover new followers on this new platform. The Webtoon format is already acquainted to tens of millions of youthful customers.
What the inventory surge means for buyers
Collectively, the 2 Disney bulletins have greater than doubled Webtoon’s inventory value in lower than 5 weeks. The entire achieve provides as much as 117% as of this writing.
Many small corporations would react to this sort of surge by issuing new shares, basically shoveling money from new buyers to the corporate’s coffers. However Webtoon is an independently managed, California-based subsidiary of South Korean web companies large Naver. A big inventory providing would undermine the guardian firm’s voting energy. Due to this fact, the Naver backing ought to defend Webtoon shareholders in opposition to pricey share dilution. It is no assure, however I do not anticipate Naver to minimize its energy within the Webtoon boardroom.
As for the Disney/Webtoon pairing, it stays to be seen how rapidly this enterprise can get going. Webtoon remains to be creating the cellular app and back-end infrastructure to assist this undertaking, with no agency launch date within the books but. On the identical time, launching needs to be straightforward with Naver’s large information facilities and Disney’s advertising and marketing muscle.
So it is a speculative bounce, however backed by a plethora of big-name property. I am keeping track of this 20-year-old digital media upstart, ready for Disney’s fireworks to begin earlier than placing money into this inventory. There’s a lot the 2 companions aren’t saying about monetary agreements and anticipated earnings.
