Kakao Leisure, owned by South Korean tech large Kakao, will shut down the Korean department of Tapas Leisure, the U.S.-headquartered storytelling platform, subsequent month. 

Kakao Leisure advised TechCrunch that it plans to shut the Korean workplace as a part of a restructuring effort to zero in on the corporate’s North American and different world items. The closure may also embody layoffs impacting the Korean-based staff.

“Tapas Leisure is streamlining operations to reply flexibly [and quickly] within the North American market in response to the worldwide financial downturn,” a Kakao Leisure spokesperson advised TechCrunch. “Tapas Korea has been within the service of operation and advertising and marketing of Tapas Leisure that’s headquartered within the U.S.”  

The corporate didn’t present the full variety of workers at Tapas Leisure and what number of workers at Tapas Korea can be laid off. In response to native media shops, Tapas Korea has about 20 workers. 

KaKao Leisure has three core items: an artist company (Kakao Leisure), a storytelling unit (Tapas Leisure), and a Spotify-like music enterprise (Melon). 

Tapas Leisure operates Tapas, a Los Angeles-based webcomic platform; Radish, a New York-based serialized fiction app; and Wuxiaworld, an Asian fantasy fiction platform. 

Kakao Leisure will take over the duties beforehand dealt with by Tapas Korea, a call made as a result of the bigger group has extra expertise and capabilities, the spokesperson defined. They added that this isn’t associated to Silicon Valley Financial institution’s failure final week even though Tapas Leisure is a depositor of SVB. The corporate is at present making ready measures to take care of the fallout of the SVB collapse, together with diversifying belongings into totally different banks and accounts. Because of the U.S. authorities and regulators’ fast actions, which can assure all deposits, the spokesperson stated there shouldn’t be any impact on the corporate. 

The spokesperson additionally stated the restructuring just isn’t associated to an ongoing acquisition deal talks Kakao is holding relating to Ok-pop company SM Leisure. 

The information of the Korean department shutdown comes almost two months after Kakao Leisure’s huge fundraising of about $966 million (1.2 trillion received) from Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund and Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC earlier this yr. The corporate stated it will use the financing for additional worldwide enlargement and acquisitions. 

In Might 2022, Kakao Leisure merged two storytelling platforms, Tapas and Radish Media, to speed up Kakao Leisure’s progress in North America. After the merger, it rebranded the mixed unit to Tapas Leisure.