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| Company type | Entertainment |
|---|---|
| Industry | Animation production |
| Founded | June 2010; 14 years ago (2010-06) |
| Headquarters | 5th Floor, 94 Myeongdal-ro,Seocho-dong, Seoul, South Korea |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | CEO Kim Min-seok CFO Lee Ryan Seung-kyu VP Park Hyun-woo |
Number of employees | 200[1] |
| Website | www |
The Pinkfong Company (Korean: 더핑크퐁컴퍼니) previously known asSmartStudy andSmart Books Media, is a global entertainment company. Their brands andintellectual property includePinkfong andBaby Shark, and they have produced original animated shows, world live tours, and interactive video games. On January 6, 2022, they changed their corporate name from Smart Study to The Pinkfong Company.
The Pinkfong Company was founded in June 2010 as Smart Study and Smart Books Media[2] by three former game developers, CEO Kim Min-seok, CFO Lee Ryan Seung-kyu and VP Park Hyun-woo.[3]
Kim, who was around thirty-years-old at the time, was a publisher and the oldest son of his family's business, Samsung Publishing Company Ltd., The Pinkfong Company'sparent company, with his father, CEO Kim Jin-yong, and his grandfather, the company's founder, Kim Bong-kyu.[4] The company, established on July 3, 2002, has no relation to theSamsung Group,[5] and mainly published books for children and magazines for computer users, with another division operating food courts in highway service areas and a subsidiary operation that marketed stationery products.[6][7] Kim joined the company, in preparation as a successor, in 2008, and, while there, he helped launch a self-directed program "Samsung English", and worked on contentdigitization and app development.[4] He studied to be aninformation specialist atYonsei University and worked at the game companyNexon while in college. After graduation, he was a developer and project manager atHangame[4] and also, worked atNHN.[3]
The Pinkfong Company was formed by Kim, his close friend Park, who also worked at NHN, and Lee, who he met at Nexon. Lee had begun his career as anonline community developer at Freechal.[3]
While brainstorming ideas for the company, the thought of making video games was quickly dropped, because, as Lee said, “At that point, we were all tired of making games". The final choices were education and medicine, but as they had no expertise in medicine, they focused on education. With more ideas from Samsung Publishing, they decided to focus on the children's education market by making and uploading four music videos for Samsung Publishing's children's songs on their apps. The international response was good. “It was then that we realized that instead of making what we want, we should create content based on what the market wants,” Lee said.[3]
Discussing what market they would focus on, Kim said reaching out to global customers was more viable, as potential customers were limited in South Korea, where the birthrate per year was around 400,000.[8] They further planned to targetpre-kindergarten or 2-year-old tokindergarten, looking to open offices in China and the U.S. to make local content geared for each of those markets. According to Lee, the U.S. users favored "interactive, actionable content such as writing letters on the tablet or taking pictures with the character", while Asian users preferred "one-way streaming video content".[9] Based on results in South Korea and China, they focused on creating content in English and Spanish for the U.S. market,[10] and started producing videos with its characters in several languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish and Russian; and operating their own mobile app providing content directly to viewers.[11] Many of the creators at the company were from children's book publishing and many of the apps were based onchant melodies to attract children's attention.[12]
They also addedmobile VOD, comics, and finally, games.[13] As the company grew, they continued their debate on games and entertainment versus education. "Education combined with entertainment, edutainment, is hard to achieve. If it's too much focused on games, it has less educational value, and if it's too much focused on education, it will need sugar-coating with game features", Lee said.[9] Consequently, they returned to their forte in September, 2016, when they released a mobile game called “Monster Super League”.[11] Kim said he understood the importance of child education, but thought about the expertise of team members who were prior game developers at Nexon orNCSoft, and who were also fathers.[12]
They realized their market with international growth throughGoogle andAppleapp stores and expanded toIPTV in late 2013. They felt their willingness to understand subtle cultural differences instead of just enhancing language aspects benefited them. In particular, for Chinese marketing, they created new work using oldChinese fables and texts that Chinese children would know from kindergarten, and uploading them on native platforms likeYouku,iQiyi andTencent Video in China, whereYouTube is banned.[3]
In August 2015, their big breakthrough occurred on YouTube with their popular character andbrand Pinkfong, amagenta-colored animated fox,[3] which was used in a "Baby Shark[broken anchor]" song and dance video. It was launched in late 2015, and started going viral on YouTube in 2016, becoming the company's most popular series with 800 million views by September 2018.[citation needed] By 2018, the company reported 150 million people in 112 countries had downloaded its app.[11]
By 2014, the parent company, Samsung Publishing, was seeing an increased net profit from its new subsidiary The Pinkfong Company,[14] and in 2017, Samsung Publishing sales were approximately $160 million.[5] In 2015, SmartStudy's sales were 9.5 billion won (about US$8.5 million). In 2016, The Pinkfong Company's sales increased by 80 percent, due to revenue from YouTube and apps sales, to 17.5 billionwon (about US$15.5 million), with overseas sales accounting for 65 percent.[3][8] In 2017, The Pinkfong Company's sales were 27.2 billion won (about US$24,127,000) with an operating profit of 1.9 billion won (about US$1,685,000).[11]
In September 2018, Samsung Publishing's stocks "soared" by more than 76 percent after Pinkfong'sBaby Shark song charted on theUK Top 40 at number 37.[5] In November 2018, industry sources were predicting that The Pinkfong Company was preparing to gopublic in 2020, with CEO Kim the biggest shareholder with 23.1 percent stake and Samsung Publishing which owns 20.8 percent.[11]
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