(Reuters) – Shares of online comics platform Webtoon Entertainment rose as much as 14.3% above their initial public offering price in their Nasdaq debut on Thursday.
The stock opened at $21.30, valuing the company at $2.71 billion, and traded as high as $24. It was last trading at $22.86 shortly after midday.
The company, backed by South Korean tech giant Naver, raised $315 million and sold 15 million shares in the IPO at the high end of its trading range of $18 to $21.
The strong debut bodes well for companies looking to go public as the summer IPO market approaches new issuers.
Webtoon, based in Los Angeles, California, is a storytelling platform hosting thousands of stories spanning over 20 genres, including fantasy, romance, comedy, and horror.
The company was founded in 2005 as a side project of CEO Junkoo Kim, then a search engineer at Naver.
Webtoon sold about 2.4 million shares to Naver at the IPO price in a simultaneous private placement for proceeds of nearly $50 million.
Webtoons are short, digitally created comics optimized for reading on mobile devices. The format, which began production in Korea two decades ago, is inexpensive to produce and can be created by anyone with a tablet.
The format, which draws on a rich history of visual storytelling in Korea, has gained popularity globally following the success of K-pop, K-dramas and other Korean cultural exports.
Some of the most popular webtoons include Lore Olympus, the romantic version of the Greek myth of Persephone, and The Sound of Your Heart, a semi-autobiographical story.
Over the past decade, dozens of webtoons have been adapted into popular dramas and movies like Hellbound, Bloodhounds, and Sweet Home on streaming services like Netflix (NASDAQ:), amazon (NASDAQ:) Prime Video, and Apple (NASDAQ:) TV.
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