[Asia Economy Reporter Jang Hyowon] Pencher Invest announced on the 9th that the video content fund ‘Pencher K-Content Investment Association’ was formed with a scale of 91.1 billion KRW on the 28th of last month.
The fund’s general partner (GP) is Pencher Invest, with LG Electronics, LG Uplus, Kakao Entertainment, Shinhan Financial Group, Barunson E&A, and Barunson participating as limited partners (LPs).
Recently, the video content industry has continued to face investment contraction due to COVID-19 and the ongoing economic downturn, but outstanding Korean video content works are receiving global attention despite this.
Accordingly, Pencher Invest explained that leading domestic companies representing various industries have united to form a large-scale fund to foster the growth of Korea’s content industry and create a virtuous cycle ecosystem. Through this large-scale fund formation, it is expected to revitalize the somewhat stagnant video content investment and inject new vitality into the domestic content industry.
This fund plans to actively discover content with global competitiveness both domestically and internationally, and by jointly holding IP with creators, it aims to establish a new investment structure where the value generated from content can be returned to the creators themselves.
The fund’s primary investment targets are project investments in video content such as films and dramas, and the copyrights and other intellectual property rights (IP) of the completed productions will be held by the creators who contributed to the works.
This fund was realized through the decisions of LG Electronics, LG Uplus, Kakao Entertainment, and Shinhan Financial Group. LG Electronics and LG Uplus made leading investments to expand their global status in hardware production such as TVs and to extend their telecommunications business into the content sector. Shinhan Financial Group decided to participate to protect the IP of K-content with excellent competitiveness and to enhance the global status of K-content as a global leading financial company. Kakao Entertainment actively participated to promote the production of excellent content with global competitiveness and to improve the domestic content production environment.
A Pencher Invest official stated, “By having creators jointly hold the IP of content, we will create an ecosystem where creators can regain sovereignty over creation and profits.” He added, “Furthermore, the content invested through this fund will not be dependent on or restricted to specific media or platforms, so we will maximize profits by flexibly and diversely applying distribution methods such as worldwide theatrical distribution or broadcasting rights sales (VOD, NFT, etc.) according to the characteristics of the content.”
Meanwhile, Pencher Invest plans to continuously form related follow-up funds in cooperation with interested companies going forward.
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