A Korean-born game company chooses to list in Tokyo (2011)

Choosing to be a company whose home and breadwinner don’t match

The reasons president Seung-woo Choi gave cannot be explained by the efficiency of fundraising alone. NASDAQ, being farther away, might well have offered advantages in name recognition or in the scale of what could be raised; yet the company chose proximity and the character of a place that was a “mecca of gaming.” To the question of where a game company should have its worth appraised, the decision of a Korea-born online-game company to choose the Japanese stock market can be seen to reveal a way of choosing location that goes beyond mere capital policy.

That said, this choice, at the very moment of listing, also saddled the company with a structural twist: its legal home and its main battlefield do not coincide. The path of continuing to explain profits earned in Korea, and later China, through Japanese disclosure formats and accounting standards has not changed even more than a decade on. In the paradox that Tokyo — chosen for its geographic closeness — thereafter became the place that endlessly translates the results of distant Korea and China, the character of this decision can be glimpsed.