이 기사는 2021년 11월 18일 08:01 thebell 에 표출된 기사입니다.

Market insiders are paying attention to NCSoft’s North American subsidiary NCWest as South Korea's game developer will use NCWest as a springboard for its overseas expansion.

“We see NCWest as a very important stepping stone in our current M&A strategy,” said the company last week in its third quarter earnings call.

NCWest has been picked as the foothold of NCSoft’s M&A strategy as it is serving as an intermediate holding company. NCSoft has a relatively simple governance structure with fewer subsidiaries compared to other game developers. It establishes a subsidiary only when the subsidiary’s business area is different from that of NCSoft, such as global K-pop fan community platform Klap and professional baseball team NC Dinos.

The intermediate holding company NCWest is a subsidiary of NCSoft and has US-based game studio ArenaNet and NC Interactive as its second-tier subsidiaries. NCWest will make it easier to reorganize the company's governance structure in case it carries out a cross-border M&A deal.

NCWest entered the North American game market in 2012, launching massive multiplayer online role-playing games including Guild Wars 2, Aion, and Blade & Soul. It also released its new console game Fuser in November 2020, targeting the North American and European markets. NCWest has garnered 12 million users mainly from the North American and European markets so far.

NCSoft has prepared for the overseas expansion since last year through an organization reshuffle. The company created the Principal Globalization Officer (PGO) division under chief strategy officer (CSO) and president Yoon Song-yee in January 2020. With the launch, the newly established division has reorganized most of the company’s overseas business strategies, ranging from overseas intellectual property business to publishing strategies.

Yoon has focused on the overseas business ever since she joined NCSoft as CSO in 2008. She has led NCWest for more than nine years and the company swung to a net profit in the first quarter of 2021 for the first time in six years.

NCWest operated in the red for six years after it swung to a net operating loss of 22.2 billion won and a net loss of 23.4 billion won in 2015. In 2019, it had to raise funds from NCSoft as it fell into capital erosion.

But the company saw a turnaround thanks to its launch of new title Fuser in November 2020. It recorded a net profit of 2.5 billion won on revenue of 37.3 billion won in the first quarter of this year.

Yoon is expected to have a bigger role, with the acceleration of the company’s M&A strategy. While Hong Won-jun, NCSoft's chief financial officer, will lead a deal process, Yoon will be in charge of the actual business operations.

“NCWest’s financial performance will further improve when Lineage 2M launches in the North American and European markets in December,” said an official at NCSoft. (Reporting by Won-ji Hwang)