Posters for an online exhibition of popular Korean webtoon series / Courtesy of Korea Manhwa Contents Agency

• ●Korean webtoon companies establish foreign subsidiaries in Europe.

• ●Competition to dominate Japan continues to heat up.

The Korean webtoon industry is expanding to dominate digital comics markets around the world, including Europe and even Japan, the wellspring of thriving anime and manga markets.

Tech giant Naver and Kakao recently joined the competition, expanding their businesses in the European webtoon market and establishing foreign subsidiaries.

Naver Webtoon, run by internet portal Naver, announced on March 21 that it will be setting up a European subsidiary, Webtoon EU (tentative name), to expedite its business in the region.

“Europe has great potential in the digital comics market as the number of users is rapidly growing,” Naver Webtoon CEO Kim Joon-ku said in a press release. “We plan to localize our strategy and speed up the process to enter the (local) market through a European subsidiary.”

The company started offering services in France in 2019, featuring its works in French, Spanish and German. Naver Webtoon plans to scout local creative talent and add about 200 French webtoons and 100 German webtoons throughout this year.

Kakao’s webtoon subsidiary, Kakao Piccoma, also launched its webtoon service in France last month, after establishing a French subsidiary, Piccoma Europe, in September last year.

According to state-run Korea Creative Contents Agency, the digital comics market in Europe has been growing every year and is estimated to account for about 26.6 percent of the global market.

Among the European countries, France has the largest comics market, which was valued at US$298 million last year. It is expected to grow by 3 to 4 percent each year and reach US$346 million by 2025.

Meanwhile, competition is heating up among Korean webtoon companies to capture a bigger slice of Japan’s comics market, the world’s largest.

Kakao Piccoma’s digital comics platform in Japan, called Piccoma, has become the most downloaded comics app there since 2020, about four years after the service was launched.

The company plans to roll out a new publishing platform called Piccoverse in the first half of this year to help local publishers digitally release their content.

Naver, which has topped Japan’s webtoon market after launching its webtoon platform LINE Manga in 2013, has been striving to reclaim the top spot in the market.

The company’s Japanese subsidiary, LINE Digital Frontier, announced on March 31 that it has acquired the e-book service, eBOOK Initiative Japan.

The combined sales of LINE Manga and eBOOK Initiative Japan stood at about 800 billion won (US$657.4 million) in 2021, and their monthly active users total over 20 million. The company is projected to see the biggest sales growth among digital comics platforms with the latest acquisition.

The two webtoon giants continue to garner success in other Asian countries, like Thailand and Indonesia.

Naver has become the biggest grossing web-comics application for Google Play in Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia. It also achieved record-high weekly transactions in terms of value in February of this year in those countries.

Kakao is also enjoying success with its killer content, “The Office Blind Date,” following the success of its live-action adaptation “A Business Proposal.”

The romantic comedy, which also streams on Netflix, has garnered popularity since airing in February, topping Netflix’s official weekly top 10 charts for non-English series for three consecutive weeks. The number of views for the series’s original webtoon surged 10 times since its broadcast in Thailand and 13 times in Taiwan and Indonesia, according to the company.

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