Krafton Ventures into New Food Market
Subsidiary 'Between Us' Merged into Thingsflow
Accelerating NFT Business... Establishes Corporation with Naver Z
[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Krafton, which has declared its entry into the future content industry based on Web 3.0 (decentralized web), is accelerating its business expansion. In the first half of the year alone, through more than 10 new investments and mergers and acquisitions (M&A), it is making efforts to enhance its content capabilities beyond gaming.
Expanding from Games to Web 3.0
On the 19th, Krafton announced that it will merge its subsidiary Between Us into Thingsflow as of June 1. Between Us is a subsidiary established by Krafton in March last year, which acquired the couple messenger ‘Between’ business unit from VCNC.
Thingsflow is an interactive content production company acquired last June. It is a startup well known to the public through its character intellectual property (IP)-based chat content platform ‘HelloBot’.
Krafton is known to have planned the merger of Between Us from the time it acquired Thingsflow. Between Us has been collecting data such as texts input by users for research purposes, and Krafton believes that the merger will create synergy effects to strengthen its artificial intelligence (AI) business capabilities.
Krafton plans to focus on diversifying its business to strengthen Web 3.0 this year. Web 3.0 is characterized by individuals owning their own data directly and connecting through blockchain technology, rather than a few entities monopolizing data.
In particular, Krafton is accelerating its efforts to strengthen its non-fungible token (NFT) business, which is considered a key means of expanding Web 3.0.
Joint Venture with Naver Z for NFT
Krafton is currently promoting the establishment of a joint venture (JV) corporation with Naver Z to expand its NFT business. They are also designing a sandbox editing tool capable of game development and metaverse (extended virtual world) implementation, aiming for an alpha test in the first quarter of 2023.
In February, Krafton made equity investments of 3 billion KRW and 5 billion KRW in Seoul Auction Blue and X by Blue, respectively. Seoul Auction Blue is an affiliate of the domestic art auction company ‘Seoul Auction,’ and X by Blue is a subsidiary of Seoul Auction Blue, conducting NFT businesses such as art co-purchasing and digital content. Additionally, Krafton has made investments this year in Indian game developer Nautilus Mobile and India’s largest audio content platform KukuFM, expanding its content domain.
Krafton CEO Changhan Kim stated at the regular shareholders’ meeting held in March, “Based on our core competency in game development, we plan to actively pursue research and investment in deep learning, virtual reality (VR), and Web 3.0·NFT.”
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