Kakao Entertainment merges Tapas Media and Radish Media

Kakao Entertainment has merged Tapas Media and Radish Media, two U.S. subsidiaries.

The transaction was completed on Aug, 1.

Tapas Entertainment, the surviving entity, will seek to increase the number of webtoon and web novel viewers in the North American market with a more streamlined and efficient corporate structure, using products generated by Tapas, Radish and Wuxiaworld, another Kakao Entertainment company.

Radish and Wuxiaworld are web novel services, and Tapas offers both webtoons and web novels.

The company will focus on "novel comics," which are webtoon adaptations of popular web novels. It believes that piggybacking off of existing works guarantees more customers.

"The novel comics genre has contributed to the huge growth of the local webtoon and web novel business," Kakao Entertainment said in a press release. Tapas Entertainment, "now has the foundations to grow its novel comics genre more vigorously."

The company will be led by co-CEOs Kim Chang-won, the former CEO of Tapas Media, and Park Jong-chul, leader of Kakao Entertainment's global business unit.

The merger was announced May and was undertaken to help Kakao Entertainment grow outside of Korea by providing a single corporate structure for a number of assets.

The companies were combined at a ratio of 18 shares of Radish to one share of Tapas Media. The merged company will be 97.44 percent owned by Kakao Entertainment.

In 2021, the Korean company spent $950 million acquiring Radish and Tapas Media.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]