The Tamesis
Established In 2010, Pinkfong was an obscure amusement business up until its “Child Shark Dancing” youngsters’s video on YouTube came to be a hit in 2018.
Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
Seoul-based Pinkfong Workshop, the business behind the globe’s most-watched YouTube video clip “Child Shark Dancing,” saw its shares leap 9.3% in its launching on the South Oriental stock exchange on Tuesday, providing it a market price of 596 billion won ($ 407 million).
Pinkfong’s share cost skyrocketed to a high of 61,500 won throughout the Kosdaq small-cap session prior to shutting at 41,550 won. The business increased 76 billion won by marketing 2 million shares at 38,000 shares each, the top end of its listing cost array.
Pinkfong was established in 2010 as an obscure amusement business up until its two-minute “Child Shark Dancing” youngsters’s video on YouTube in 2018 went viral. The video clip astounds youngsters’s eyes and ears with vibrant computer animations, basic dancing steps and recurring verses including Child Shark and Pinkfong the fox. In 2020, it came to be YouTube’s most-viewed video clip, a title it still holds, with 16.4 billion sights to day.
Structure on the worldwide success of the “Child Shark” solitary, Pinkfong has actually broadened right into tv programs such as “Child Shark” Huge program! Co-production with Nickelodeon United States (makers of “SpongeBob SquarePants”), musicals, academic applications and youngsters’s product.
The business has actually additionally broadened its IP profile past its legendary sharks and foxes, including personalities like Bebefinn, a pink-haired kid whose favored personality is Child Shark, and Sealook, a team of plump seals. Right after its Bebefinn computer animated preschool program debuted on the streaming system in 2022, it made it to Netflix’s leading 10 youngsters graphes in 9 nations, consisting of the USA.
To increase cash with the going public, Pinkfong prepares to broaden its target market past kids to youngsters and young adults. Prior to it went public, Pinkfong had actually currently established its views on young adults and released an enchanting dream webcomic called “Pinkfong”. moon shark which complies with a human-looking shark princess that falls for a K-pop idolizer. The business stated it prepares to invest over half of its IPO continues to introduce 3 brand-new IPs by 2028, according to its program.
At the exact same time, Pinkfong prepares to get a workshop focusing on 3D youngsters’s web content manufacturing. The business will certainly additionally establish AI devices for pre-production, such as speech synthesis and photo generation, while increasing its reach from its major abroad market of The United States and Canada to Japan, Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
In the very first 6 months of 2025, Pinkfong’s earnings dropped 2.4% to 45.2 billion won, and internet revenue plunged 67% to 3.8 billion won. Throughout the duration, 68% of the business’s sales originated from IP-based web content, with 15% from product, 10% from licensing, and the rest from video games and various other locations. Greater than 75% of its earnings originates from overseas.
Pinkfong’s owner, Kim Min-seok, formerly operated at South Korea’s leading on-line pc gaming business, Nexon and NHN. The 44-year-old possesses 15.9% of Pinkfong. His uncle is Kim Chang-soo, the mogul of Oriental style business F&F. Chang-soo holds 0.7% of Pinkfong’s shares.
throughout a meeting Forbes In 2023, Kim shared his aspiration to expand Pinkfong right into a multi-generational amusement business. “Among our supreme objectives is to produce happy web content that brings individuals with each other throughout generations and histories,” he stated. “It would certainly be extremely purposeful if we saw kids that matured viewing Pinkfong and Child Shark mature to appreciate Pinkfong and Child Shark with their very own youngsters in the future.”
