Kakao Leisure, owned by South Korean tech big Kakao, will shut down the Korean department of Tapas Leisure, the U.S.-headquartered storytelling platform, subsequent month.
Kakao Leisure instructed TechCrunch that it plans to shut the Korean workplace as a part of a restructuring effort to zero in on the corporate’s North American and different international models. The closure may also embody layoffs impacting the Korean-based staff.
“Tapas Leisure is streamlining operations to reply flexibly [and quickly] within the North American market in response to the worldwide financial downturn,” a Kakao Leisure spokesperson instructed TechCrunch. “Tapas Korea has been within the service of operation and advertising and marketing of Tapas Leisure that’s headquartered within the U.S.”
The corporate didn’t present the full variety of workers at Tapas Leisure and what number of workers at Tapas Korea shall be laid off. In line with native media retailers, Tapas Korea has about 20 workers.
KaKao Leisure has three core models: an artist company (Kakao Leisure), a storytelling unit (Tapas Leisure), and a Spotify-like music enterprise (Melon).
Tapas Leisure operates Tapas, a Los Angeles-based webcomic platform; Radish, a New York-based serialized fiction app; and Wuxiaworld, an Asian fantasy fiction platform.
Kakao Leisure will take over the duties beforehand dealt with by Tapas Korea, a call made as a result of the bigger group has extra expertise and capabilities, the spokesperson defined. They added that this isn’t associated to Silicon Valley Financial institution’s failure final week even if Tapas Leisure is a depositor of SVB. The corporate is at present getting ready measures to take care of the fallout of the SVB collapse, together with diversifying belongings into completely different banks and accounts. Because of the U.S. authorities and regulators’ fast actions, which is able to assure all deposits, the spokesperson stated there shouldn’t be any impact on the corporate.
The spokesperson additionally stated the restructuring is just not associated to an ongoing acquisition deal talks Kakao is holding concerning Ok-pop company SM Leisure.
The information of the Korean department shutdown comes almost two months after Kakao Leisure’s huge fundraising of about $966 million (1.2 trillion gained) from Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund and Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC earlier this 12 months. The corporate stated it could use the financing for additional worldwide growth and acquisitions.
In Might 2022, Kakao Leisure merged two storytelling platforms, Tapas and Radish Media, to speed up Kakao Leisure’s development in North America. After the merger, it rebranded the mixed unit to Tapas Leisure.