WEBTOON Entertainment Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Dustin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Webtoon Entertainment fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, Please press star and the number one on your keypad. This time, I would now like to turn the call over to Suwon Kim, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Kim, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. As a reminder, our remarks today will include four looking statements, including those regarding our future plans, objectives, expected performance, and in particular, our guidance for the next quarter. Actual results may vary materially from today's statements. Information concerning risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could cause these results differs, including our SEC filings, including those stated in the risk factors section of our filings with the SEC. These four looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any four looking statements. Additionally, the matters we discuss today will include both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Recognizations of any non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are set forth in our earnings press release. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for GAAP measures. Joining today on the call are Jungu Kim, Founder and CEO, David Lee, CFO and COO, and Yongsoo Kim, Chief Strategy Officer. With that, I will now turn the call over to our Founder and CEO, Jungu Kim.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'll make a few brief comments on our performance, and then David will provide more detail on our results and outlook. For my full thoughts on the year and our path forward, please refer to the shareholder letter posted on our investor relations website. 2024 was an important year for Webtoon. We became a public company, making the beginning of an exciting new chapter in our history, and our creators and IPs continued to grow their influence all over the world. I am pleased to share that we reported strong results for the year 2024 with record annual revenue and profitability. Revenue of $1.35 billion grew 5% on a reported basis and 13% on a constant crisis basis. While we reported a net loss of $153 million, mostly due to non-test expenses, we reported record adjusted EBITDA of $67.9 million, an increase of more than 600% compared to 2023. We believe these results demonstrate that our strategy and flywheel are working. I'd like to share a few highlights from 2024, starting with the progress of our business in Japan. By leveraging our leading position in Korea and our successful and differentiated cross-border strategy, we've been able to take the top position in Japan for the second half of 2024, as measured by revenue in the non-game market. After successfully exporting a number of our hit Korean content to Japan, including stories like Teenage Mercenary, we are now focused on building a powerful local creator ecosystem in the market. In January, we invested in No. 9, a Japanese studio that has produced titles such as our global hit Savior of Divine Blood. which was LiveManga's first local webcomic to become a breakout hit both in and out of Japan. Our investment in No. 9 will boost our content pipeline in Japan, the company's largest geography and fastest-growing market. Further, our individual amateur platform in Japan is helping us discover local creators and maintain a pipeline of fresh, new content. Senpai is an otokono ko. It was discovered through Indies and was developed into a successful Crunchyroll anime series in 2024. With its continued popularity, this title has since been adapted into a new animated feature film by Enplex. Our incredible success in Japan is evidence of the power of our strategy. We are taking similar actions at various stages in the US and the other key markets, investing in content studios and creators to build our global content pipeline. Finishing up with IP adaptations, we had a number of successful launches in Q4, and we are off to a great start in 2025. Three examples of this include, first, Jung Yeon Hee, the star is born in Korea, was ranked sixth in Disney Plus Global TV Show category in November. Second, over the US Thanksgiving weekend, we launched Sidelined the QB and Me. The project was instant hit reaching number one on Tubi in the U.S. and Canada, drawing the biggest number of viewers of any title on Tubi in its first seven days. Its success has already led to a green light for a sequel. And finally, in January, the drama called Heroes on Call debuted on Netflix as a global streaming hit, spending four weeks in the streamer's top 10 non-English categories. We've intentionally built our global IP and creator ecosystem to develop titles that can find a variety of audience across formats. We believe these successes will continue to drive new users to our platform. as viewers seek out the original source material for these adaptations. In conclusion, our success in 2024 was driven by our passionate and dedicated community of creators and users who continue to create, share, and enjoy stories on our platform. I also want to thank our employees for their continued commitment to our company and our mission. Looking to 2025, I remain confident in our ability to continue driving innovation with bold new initiatives to grow our business and ecosystem as we continue to democratize storytelling by bringing comics and new forms of visual storytelling to the creator economy. With that, I will now turn the call over to David. David, please go ahead.