[Featured Stock] Fingerstory, Webtoon Market to Grow 13x by 2030...Emerging Strong Player Rising

[Asia Economy Reporter Hyungsoo Park] Webtoon service platform company Fingerstory is showing strong performance for two consecutive days.

As of 9:21 AM on the 9th, Fingerstory is trading at 6,730 KRW, up 11.24% from the previous day. The upward trend has continued since the price hit the daily limit the day before.

Founded in 2018, Fingerstory is a webtoon service platform company. Through 'Mutoon,' an online webtoon platform specializing in martial arts and action genres, and 'Qtoon,' a romance webtoon service platform, it provides webtoons, comics, and web novels to consumers.

Fingerstory has expanded overseas through a 'direct export method' by exporting its webtoon platform directly and an 'indirect entry method' by providing IP-owned content to other domestic companies, which then distribute it on overseas platforms they operate. It has formed partnership agreements with companies such as Naver and Kakao to enter overseas markets through them.

Since its establishment in 2018, Fingerstory recorded sales of 8.1 billion KRW in 2019, which increased to 13.1 billion KRW in 2020 and 16.3 billion KRW in 2021, marking three consecutive years of sales growth. Operating profit also rose from 700 million KRW in 2020 to 1.2 billion KRW in 2021.

La Hyunseong, CEO of Fingerstory, stated, "We plan to focus investments on securing IP (intellectual property), the core of the content business, using the funds raised through the KOSDAQ listing. We are preparing for a second leap forward through distribution, secondary production, and overseas expansion using the secured content IP."

According to a report published this month by the global market research firm Spherical Insights & Consulting, the webtoon market is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 40.8% until 2030. Accordingly, the market size, which was about 4.7 billion USD (approximately 6.2971 trillion KRW) last year, is projected to expand about 13 times to 60.1 billion USD (80.522 trillion KRW) by 2030.