"I Didn't Expect This" Thought It Would Fail but It Was a Hit... CJ Entertainment Smiles with Three Consecutive Drama Hits

‘Queen of Tears’, ‘Seonjae Upgo Twieo’ and Other Hits
Box Office Hits Reach Highest Point This Year... Full-Scale Growth Expected in Q2

The stock price of CJ ENM reached its highest level this year. There are expectations that it will rebound beyond the shock of recording a loss of over 10 billion KRW last year. As of the 24th, CJ ENM's stock price rose 4.71% from the previous day to 89,000 KRW, marking the highest point this year. It has increased by about 15% just this month.

The rise of CJ ENM is largely driven by the popularity of its content. CJ ENM has recently achieved three consecutive hits in the drama sector. "Nunmul-ui Yeowang" (The Queen of Tears) achieved a record-high average nationwide household rating of 24.9% for a tvN drama.

With two episodes remaining until the finale, the Monday-Tuesday drama "Seonjae Eopgo Twieo" (Run, Seonjae, Run) ranked first for three consecutive weeks in the TV-OTT drama buzz survey for the third week of May, according to FUNdex, a platform index by Good Data Corporation, an online content competitiveness analysis agency.

tvN Mon-Tue drama 'Seonjae Upgo Twieo'
[Image source=Provided by tvN]

Its popularity overseas is also strong. As of May 23, according to the global OTT Rakuten Viki, it ranked number one in 130 countries. Among them, 109 countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, and Mexico, have maintained the number one spot for six consecutive weeks. On Japan's largest OTT platform U-NEXT, it ranked first in overall drama, Hallyu & Asia, and viewership rankings.

With momentum added to the stock price that had bottomed out and was rebounding, the securities industry expects CJ ENM to fully recover its performance this year. Meritz Securities forecast that CJ ENM's annual sales this year will grow 18% year-on-year to 5.1538 trillion KRW. Operating profit during this period is expected to turn positive to 121.4 billion KRW.

In particular, it is expected that all business sectors will start to show results in earnest from the second quarter. CJ ENM also succeeded in turning a profit in the first quarter of this year, recording an operating profit of 12.3 billion KRW.