Kakao (CEO Lim Ji-hoon) announced on January 18th that it had successfully drawn significant investment by issuing a Global Depository Receipt (GDR) of USD 1 billion (approximately KRW 1,070 billion).
Kakao announced the GDR issuance plan last December 15th and held road shows in major overseas financial markets including Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, London, Boston, and San Francisco. Kakao originally planned to hold 36 investor meetings, but that number increased to 55 due to GDP plan’s popularity. In the following demand forecast meeting, a huge number of subscriptions led to the early confirmation of the GDR issuance. The GDR issued was listed on the Singapore Exchange on February 2nd.
A total of 8,261,731 shares were issued at KRW 129,004 (USD 121.04) per share for the GDR. The USD 1 billion fund is the largest amount raised by a domestic firm from overseas stock markets in the last ten years. Furthermore, the discount rate of 3.7% is also very low.
Park Sung-hoon, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), said: “Our global comic platform strategy has been very successful. In particular, the recent very rapid growth of Piccoma, a platform recently launched in Japan, is very encouraging. International investors therefore hold very high expectations for Kakao’s future growth potentials.”
Mr. Park also stated:”We will continue to do our utmost to maximize shareholders’ profits by pursuing M&As centered on companies that have promising growth potentials as well as profitability. We will work to secure new growth engines as well.”
With the funds raised through overseas investment, Kakao will promote M&As centered on global content platform companies in fields such as gaming, webtoons, music, and videos. The company also plans to invest in domestic and foreign companies alongside fundamental technology related to the 4th Industrial Revolution, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
（Top photo from Kakao）
This article, entitled “Kakao lands USD 1 B to strengthen content distribution and AI”, was written in Korean by Platum, translated by Flitto, edited by AllTechAsia.