PIXTA Inc. in Japan has acquired 80% of the outstanding stock of Topic Images Inc. of Korea from its parent companies, NEWSIS Co., Ltd. and NEWS1 Co., Ltd. for 130 million JPY ($1,164,780). The transaction took place on Feb 24, 2017.
Topic has been selling high-priced stock images mainly in Korea, producing many of them by itself. Topic is now a subsidiary of PIXTA and will receive PIXTA’s strong support for its business operation. However, Topic is continuously conducting its own business as an existing company.
Topic began serving customers in 1992 with a vision of offering an unparalleled level of reliability and quality images within the photo industry. Over that time, we’ve forged many long-term partnerships with partners requiring creative solutions, prompt services, and proactive communications.
"In Korea, the market of micro stock images and footage is still undeveloped, there is no market leader but very few players from overseas. We had a good chance to get into it, so we'll make our best effort to gain a big market share as fast as possible, and contribute to expand the market as well." said Daisuke Komata, founder and CEO of PIXTA Inc.
Through this acquisition, PIXTA is planning to launch its Korean site in June, 2017 and start selling 260 thousands of Korean local contents (images of Korean people, landscapes, culture and so on) by the end of 2017. It will also work on producing a variety of Korean local contents itself using Topic's photographer network.
While PIXTA is a microstock brand and Topic is a premium priced brand, one photographer who is represented by both says that in about the same amount of time Pixta has paid him almost twice as much in royalties as Topic earned for him.
This is the fifth overseas office of PIXTA, following its Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand subsidiary, and Taiwan branch.
PIXTA’s support will further strengthen Topic’s values above and Topic will faithfully implement the existing agreement forged with our partners as in the past. As of December 31, 2016 PIXTA had 309 million JPY ($2,764,060) in capital.