Neowiz Holdings Corporation (Korean: 주식회사 네오위즈홀딩스) is a holding company headquartered in Seongnam, South Korea. It was founded in 1997 by Sung Kyun Na and is best known for the video game developer and publisher Neowiz.
History
Neowiz was founded in 1997 by 8 friends, including the CEO Sung Kyun Na, who had graduated from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. The company started off as an internet content provider by developing LiveCAST, a service that delivered customizable information (e.g. news, weather, etc.) to its subscribers online. Neowiz was not able to secure enough subscribers to maintain profitability due to the lack of affordable and simple internet access. However, it was able to stay afloat by providing software development services to internet service providers in Korea and Europe.
Neowiz recognized that it was too difficult for end users to set up an internet connection and thus launched OneClick, a service allowing users to connect to the internet with one click, in April 1998. OneClick allowed users to "connect to the internet directly with one click" and users were charged according to the duration of their connection. While the product initially helped them gain widespread recognition, demand for OneClick began to decline in 2000, due to the spread of high-speed broadband internet access. In 2000, OneClick's revenue contribution was around 90%, but dropped below 12% in 2002.
Neowiz realized that with the rise of broadband internet access and the decline of OneClick's profits, it would need a new product. Therefore the company launched SayClub, an online community site with real-time communication, in July 1999. Within 3 months SayClub was able to attract 1 million users and within a year this number grew to 3 million. The service was free to use and revenue from advertisements was not able to cover the expenses. To make SayClub profitable, Neowiz thus introduced avatars in November 2000. Users could purchase clothes and accessories with money to personalize their virtual characters. This feature was a instant success and generated sales of more than $330,000 in the first month. In June 2000, Neowiz was listed on KOSDAQ.
As the market of online communities became saturated and the increasing popularity of digital cameras pushed users to portray themselves with their own photographs, Neowiz once again had to come up with a new business idea. It carried out a survey on SayClub to gather user feedback on desired new features and found out that the users wanted "more fun". Thus, Neowiz added board games to SayClub in 2002 after acquiring the game development company MCUBE in September 2001. In August 2003, it launched pmang, a new platform specifically for video games. By November of the same year, pmang was the most visited game portal in Korea, due to a large scale marketing campaign online and offline.
When CEO Sung Kyun Na came back to Neowiz after completing his military service in March 2005, he reorganized the company to focus on video games. In April 2006, Neowiz Japan, a new Japanese subsidiary, was opened and launched a game portal named Gamechu. In April 2007, Neowiz was converted into a holding company and was subsequently segmented into three entities: Neowiz Games Corporation which would focus on the development and publishing of video games, Neowiz Internet Corporation which would concentrate on the Internet business including SayClub and Neowiz Invest Corporation which would participate in both local and international investments. In July 2007, Neowiz Games Corporation was listed on KOSDAQ and got later renamed to Neowiz.
References
