Kakao
 |
|
|
Native name
|
주식회사 카카오 |
|---|---|
|
Romanized name
|
Jusikhoesa Kakao |
| Public | |
| Traded as | KRX: |
| Industry | Internet |
| Founded | October 1, 2014 |
| Headquarters | Jeju City, Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, South Korea |
|
Key people
|
Kim Beom-soo (chairman) Rim Ji-hoon (CEO) Lee Wooram (COO) |
| Products | Kakaotalk, Hanmail |
| Owner |
As of January 2016: Kim Beom-soo (18.80%) KCUBE Holdings (14.90%) Tencent Holdings Ltd. (8.40%) Star Invest Holdings Ltd. (8.30%) WeMade Entertainment Co., Ltd. (3.50%) SK Planet Co., Ltd. (2.00%) |
| Subsidiaries |
LOEN Entertainment, Inc. (76.40%) |
| Website | www |
| Kakao | |
| Hangul | 카카오 |
|---|---|
| Revised Romanization | Kakao |
| McCune–Reischauer | K'ak'ao |
Kakao (Korean: 카카오) is a South Korean internet company established in 2014. It was formed from a merger of Daum Communications and Kakao to Daum Kakao in 2014, and Daum Kakao changed its name to Kakao in 2015.
On May 28, 2015, the company acquired Path, a US social media company that had met with success in Asia. On January 11, 2016, Kakao announced it is going to buy 76.4% stake in LOEN Entertainment, Korea’s top online music service with $1.5 billion.
In 2014, Kakao Corp and Daum merged through an equity swap, creating a company with a 3.4 trillion won (about $2.9 billion USD) market capitalization. Kakao is the maker of KakaoTalk, South Korea’s top messaging service, while Daum is one of the country’s largest Internet portal sites. The new entity Daum Kakao was valued at close to a massive sum of 10 trillion won (US$9.45 billion). The company then changed its name to 'Kakao' and named Rim Ji-hoon as its CEO.
The new name will help bolster the corporate brand as a mobile life platform maker, which isn't fully expressed through the current name representing two merged firms. They want to clarify their identification as a mobile company with a new CEO. And there are also some other reasons that they had to change CEO. Gambling and censorship problems still remain with Kim-beom-soo(former CEO for Kakao Talk), so the board of Kakao decided to change itsCEO. The board of Kakao think new flowing business models should go with new one.
They set up their new vision with their new CEO. 'Connect everything' through this we can assume that they want to be a player in Global Market.
And they have plans to evolve as a '020 company' in Korea. Many new business models are heading up to the 020 sections.
When the announcement by the Korean government that it would tighten its real-time monitoring to prevent people from spreading false information, for which the company cooperated fully by providing reams of conversation data. KakaoTalk users expressed their displeasure to the censorship by saying that they would migrate to other messenger services. Because of this, as many as 1.5 million users have recently signed up for the hitherto obscure mobile messenger service "Telegram," a German-made app known for its security.
Daum Kakao has explained the censorsip, saying, "It is unthinkable not to follow the rules in a constitutional country."
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Wikipedia