Henry Chang: The Most Dedicated CEO in South Korea, Leads Wemade to New Heights
July 20 2022 - 7:14AM
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Wemade (a pioneer South Korean game developer and publisher)
announced on July 12th that its CEO Henry Chang exercised his stock
options and bought 223,504 shares for an astonishing USD 2.67
million (KRW 3,5 billion) and did not sell a single share. As a
result, Mr. Chang’s stake in Wemade reached 1.5%. Wemade shifted
its focus towards metaverse and blockchain technology with an
emphasis on developing and servicing well-made games with
economically meaningful experiences. As a result, Wemade developed
“Wemix”, a game-centric blockchain platform (with 14 Play &
Earn titles), that provides services including cryptocurrency
wallet, NFT auction & marketplace, staking, and more, based on
its utility coin WEMIX. This is not the first time Mr. Chang has
shown his dedication to the firm. In fact, he announced earlier
this year his pledge to invest all his present salary and dividends
in WEMIX coin. Wemade announced on June 24th that Mr. Chang’s
purchase of 13,424.6 WEMIX coins (worth USD 38,125.86) with the
salary he received from the same month. This brings his total
investment to 51,258.354 WEMIX coins (worth USD 145,573.7). This is
also the fourth time he invested his salary in WEMIX Coin, in
addition to his dividends from last year. Mr. Chang has constantly
fulfilled his promise to contribute his compensation to the
sustainable development of Wemix ecosystem. He also stressed that
he does not plan to sell a single share nor a single WEMIX coin.
CEO compensation packages are part of corporate governance
mechanisms. Companies often offer their CEOs stock options that tie
CEO’s compensation to the company’s stock performance which creates
incentives for CEOs to manage the firm and work hard in ways that
maximize firm market value. Often misunderstood, stock options are
criticized for inducing top management to pursue strategies that
only push the stock price up in the short term. This would benefit
opportunist CEOs who time the exercise of their stock options to
when the stock price is high and sell their newly acquired shares
at a premium. Mr. Chang is one of the very few CEOs in South Korea
to invest in his company’s stock despite very high volatility in
the capital markets. Mr. Chang’s move is highly contrary to a few
CEOs who exercised their stock options to sell the shares last
year, only six to twelve months after the companies were listed. In
contrast, there are often publicized cases where executives
conducted massive selloffs of shares received from their stock
options which enraged minority shareholders. The shareholder
sentiment is especially strong when it takes place soon after the
company goes public and draws a misconnection between the
shareholders and the leaders. However, Mr. Chang’s move is exactly
the opposite. Mr. Chang reiterated his engagement in the firm’s
long-term success and shareholder value. His dedication and hard
work led Wemade to new heights. Recently the company announced USD
131 million in sales revenue for the first quarter of 2022 alone.
This represents an astonishing 72% increase compared to last year.
MIR4, Wemade’s flagship P&E MMORPG (from the Legend of Mir
series) gathered 6.5 million active users within a few months of
its global launch in 12 languages and 170 countries. Its successor
MIR M topped Google Play’s popularity chart after its release in
South Korea in June 2022. The highly anticipated global P&E
version will be launched within the year. Since Mr. Chang’s
commitment has no limit, Wemade is expected to continue its winning
strike with more achievements in both its video game development
and publishing services and its blockchain ecosystem.
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