"Box Office Hit" of Avatar, Getting Experts Off Guard

It was heavily cloudy.

On January 16, NeoWiz held a session to announce its last year`s performance. But, its employees and directors were anxiously looking at each other, saying, "What if only a handful of people come today again?" NeoWiz was no longer the NeoWiz that few would bother to know of. Getting close to the starting time, an army of stock analysts and economic researchers, or 60 in total, stormed into the room.

NeoWiz president Park Jin-hwan, stammering out of joy, began to answer, using the dialect of Kyungsang Province, the endless questions from the experts.

"La… last year, we earned 41 billion won in sale. Pro… profits amounted to 9.. 9.5 billion won. This year…"

▽ Who would bother to buy "nothing"? = Only 6 experts attended its announcement session for its first quarter performance, which took place on April 16, 2002. Even in the face of 1.2 billion loss for that quarter, president Park confidently expressed his trust in the commercial success of SayClub . "Only for one year since we began to put the characters up for sale, we recorded more than 10 billion won in sale. Considering the achievement, I believe NeoWiz will bring about a big success." No analyst, however, would buy the future envisioned by Park.

"Who would buy that picture thing?" "Isn`t it just a result of customers` curiosity? I don`t think it will last long." "Maybe…"

That night, president Park did not leave his office. He mulled over the cold reactions shown by analysts.

"No, I will make it. People have begun to open up their wallets. That matters to me."

Park sprang up and threw onto the floor everything he could grab, and his phone got broken into pieces. He shouted,

"I will make it, make it!"

▽ "Made it!" = Experts were wrong. Taking place of ID`s consisting of letters, an animation character called avatar, began to secure its place among SayClub members as a necessity to represent his/her personality. Its members started to pay a total of 20-30 million won a day to buy items like cars, shoes and hats to groom their characters, funneling a steady flow of money into the company. To meet the demand of its members for an online game service, NeoWiz acquired M Cube, an online game service provider, and launched its own game site. And the new site has been gaining in more and more revenues, projecting a prediction that it will outsell SayClub in the third quarter this year.

▽ It`s only beginning = NeoWiz motivates and empowers itself through a series of meetings. Its 190 employees hold meetings, whenever an idea pops up. A meeting could be conducted by a team, or just remains a conversation between colleagues. In total, about 100 meetings are held every day.

All the ideas suggested during the meetings are stored in the Idea Bank, an in-house network, classified based on topics and teams, for further debate.

Even after securing characters and games as the successful sources of income, NeoWiz employees will not set themselves loose, satisfied with the current achievement. When asked, "Isn`t it enough?" They firmly brush it off and reply,

"We`ve just used two of the thousands of ideas stored in the Idea Bank."

Seong-Yub Ra cpu@donga.com