Shares of Webtoon Entertainment (WBTN +0.74%) skyrocketed on Tuesday, peaking with a 42.5% one-day gain just after noon ET. The company just expanded its partnership with Walt Disney (DIS 0.17%), significantly boosting the business value of the Webtoon digital comics platform.
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Disney is back with a bigger deal
About a month ago, on Aug. 12, Webtoon struck up an agreement with the House of Mouse. That deal involved about 100 hand-picked comics from the worlds of Star Wars, Spider-Man, Avengers, Alien, and the core Disney storytelling brand. Investors were quick to embrace that announcement, which is easy to find on Webtoon's three-month stock chart.
Today's Disney deal builds on the earlier contract. Now, the two companies are working up a much broader digital comics presentation with more than 35,000 titles from Disney's comic-book worlds. Many of these stories have not been available in digital form before, and Disney will develop a few entirely original titles for this platform.
Webtoon's content catalog just got a Hulk-sized adrenaline shot. At the same time, a ton of rarely seen Disney content should find new fans on this new platform. The Webtoon format is already familiar to millions of younger consumers.
NASDAQ: WBTN
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What the stock surge means for investors
Together, the two Disney announcements have more than doubled Webtoon's stock price in less than five weeks. The total gain adds up to 117% as of this writing.
Many small companies would react to this kind of surge by issuing new shares, essentially shoveling cash from new investors to the company's coffers. But Webtoon is an independently managed, California-based subsidiary of South Korean internet services giant Naver. A large stock offering would undermine the parent company's voting power. Therefore, the Naver backing should protect Webtoon shareholders against costly share dilution. It's no guarantee, but I don't expect Naver to lessen its power in the Webtoon boardroom.
As for the Disney/Webtoon pairing, it remains to be seen how quickly this business can get going. Webtoon is still developing the mobile app and back-end infrastructure to support this project, with no firm release date in the books yet. At the same time, launching should be easy with Naver's massive data centers and Disney's marketing muscle.
So it's a speculative jump, but backed by a plethora of big-name assets. I'm keeping an eye on this 20-year-old digital media upstart, waiting for Disney's fireworks to start before putting cash into this stock. There's so much the two partners aren't saying about financial agreements and expected profits.
