NAVER Corporation

KB Cookman Bank has won a mandate to lead a syndicated loan of $10.7 trillion, which the Korea Herald put at about $8 billion.

The money will fund a Brookfield-backed computing infrastructure project that will supply capacity to NaverCloud, the cloud arm of the internet company Naver.

The bank called it the country's first financing deal backed by graphics processors and the largest syndicated loan ever arranged in South Korea.

The deal shows how AI data centres are increasingly being paid for with large bank loans tied to the chips themselves, rather than only with cash from big technology companies.

And I was interested in the format and I was clicking around and I found a contest for where they were offering $30,000 for the comic.

the first prize and i was like i had seen contests like these before and usually it was like ip farms um and i was like either this is a huge huge scam or there's a shift coming some type of something i don't know about or understand and so i did some research and discovered that um Webtoons was essentially owned and managed by a platform called Naver, which is sort of like the Google of South Korea.

It's a huge, huge mammoth of a company.

And they had really – in South Korea, they had had a publishing crash in the early 2000s that had led a lot of cartoonists to basically go online.

Um, now have hundred thirteen million users out there.

And likewise, uh, another rival of, uh, Kakao in Korea is Naver.

They create a line service which has more than basically several hundred of users all over the world.

Basically, it's a mobile me- messenger services.

And, uh, telecom company were trying to create a healthcare service using sort of their devices.

And there are many, uh, there are and there have been many, uh, incubation service led by big guy like Samsung, LG, SK.

Now, there's NHN, which is the number one, uh, portal like Google in Korea.

Are initiating those of, uh, in-in-incubation services.

So like, uh, so Tapas is owned by Kakao.

Kakao owns Kakao Webtoon, which is very similar to Naver Web- Webtoon, which is what is used in Korea to read webtoons.

Tapas was their like North American English language kind of like subsidiary type thing that gave them the piece of that pie.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the library either...

You do have a lot of cool Asian friends, don't you? Yes.

Naver just announced that Naver invests in us.

And then out of Hong Kong, Horizons led our Series B.

And then we also have Shanghai Media Group is also our investor and HTC.

Right.

And at the time, major Korean web portals, specifically massive tech companies like Naver and Daum, they were looking for what the industry calls sticky content.

Yes.

They needed something to keep users on their apps during their morning commutes.

That's insane growth.

It is.

And Webtoon Entertainment, which is the massive Naver-backed company that acts as the primary hub for a lot of this, they reported having somewhere on the order of 155 million monthly active users globally.

155 million?