South Korea’s leading game and online service provider NHN Corp. plans inroads to North America with webtoon business after success in Japan on the external front while concentrating on expanding cloud footprint at home.

“Our goal is to become a webtoon platform commanding 10 million users around the world,” said Jung Woo-jin, chief executive of NHN, in an interview with Maeil Business Newspaper, on Monday.

The company – headquartered in Pangyo Techno Valley, an industrial complex near Seoul – plans to secure popular webtoon contents of Korea and Japan by the first half of next year to tap North American readers based on the confidence from its Japanese operation that now boasts over 2.5 million monthly active users.

NHN recently launched webtoon service Pocket Comics in the United States.

“[K-pop superstar] BTS wouldn’t have anticipated the success they have achieved today,” Jung said. “In entertainment industry, [a company] should focus on securing quality contents and be tested of its global competitiveness while riding with time and flow.”

The CEO admitted the last failure in the North American inroads with games as the casual game industry was already dominated by others such as North European player Supercell.

“Our latest focus on contents is webtoon,” Jung said. “If a webtoon becomes popular [in North America], we can seek to make it into a film or drama.”

At home, the company will focus to enhance the competitiveness of its cloud service, a core part of the business-to-business (B2B) market.

“It is the most urgent to enhance business-to-business market-targeted services,” Jung said, noting that the company will seek to expand Internet Data Center (ICD) to support cloud business at home.

NHN plans to set up a new IDC in South Jeolla Province in Korea, adding to those in Pangyo and Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province, to create so-called “data triangle” in the country.

Jung said details of the third data center will come out by the first half of June and expected the location to be a major city in Jeolla, such as Gwangju or Jeonju near an university.

“It would be most desirable to create a cluster along with IDC where local players – not only IT companies such as game entities but also universities and small-scale ventures – come together and create synergy,” said Jung.

NHN, which started as Hangame, has diversified its business portfolio ranging from payment (Payco), cloud (Toast), music (Bugs Music), artificial intelligence (Baduk, AI Handol), to booking services (Ticketlink, Doctortour).

“Over the past years, we were focused on establishing various portfolio,” Jung said. “Our work is now on expanding the size of existing business.”

By Lee Yong-ik and Lee Eun-joo

[ⓒ Pulse by Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]