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  • 기자명 Jacob
  • Tech & Bio
  • Published 2020.11.19 04:04

ZEPETO attracts 5 billion won investment from JYP Entertainment... “Will expand global market influence”

Naver Z (co-CEOs Kim Dae-wook, Kim Chang-wook), the company that provides the global AR avatar service ZEPETO, has attracted a total of 5 billion won worth of investment from JYP Entertainment, the leader of the entertainment market with K-pop fandom.

With thisinvestment, Naver Z plans to make global IPs owned by JYP Entertainment intocontents in the ZEPETO service. Through this collaboration, the twocompanies are expected to bring new experiences to the main users of ZEPETO,millennials and generation Z and lead the global content market. Forexample, on the 31st of last month, when ZEPETO released a dance performanceteaser video of JYP Entertainment's main idol group TWICE, which wasimplemented with a 3D avatar, the number of views exceeded 1.7 million in justone week, raising great expectations from global fans.

As such, ZEPETO hasbeen deeply positioned itself in the daily lives of generation Zs around theworld with trendy and diverse services, exceeding 190 million globalsubscribers as of last October. The number of secondary contents createdusing various IPs within ZEPETO exceeds 1 billion, creating new values for anendless content platform beyond simple virtual environment-based avatarservices.

Kim Dae-wook, CEO of Naver Z, said, “Through thisinvestment, the collaboration between the two companies will become a catalystfor innovation in the global market, and this is going to be ZEPETO's uniquecontent competitiveness. We will expand the collaboration with the global IPbusiness owners to provide unparalleled services and experiences to the usersfrom all over the world.”

Naver Z is based in Pangyo. Pangyo Technovalley is the Asia Tech Hub where more than 1,200 companies in IT, CT, and BT sectors with innovative products and technologies are gathered. Located just south of the Seoul metropolitan area, easy transportation access and infrastructure provides the best environment for Korean companies to conduct businesses.

Various high-tech companies are located here, withmore than 64 thousand full-time workers with a vast majority in their 20s and30s. By industries, companies in the high-tech industry are made up of ITcompanies, content technology companies, biotechnology companies, andnanotechnology companies.

With the support from innovative companies withglobal capabilities like Kakao, NHN Entertainment, AhnLab, Krafton, NCSOFT,Nexon, and Hancom at hand, companies in Pangyo Technovalley made over 100trillion in revenue this year. A 20% increase from last year, it is expected tobecome one of the best IT clusters in Korea in near future, along with advancedtechnology research institutes like Advanced Institute of ConvergenceTechnology, KAIST, ETRI, and KETI working together to develop the relevanttechnologies further.

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