[Exclusive] NXC Suspected of Purchasing Yoo Jung-hyun Nexon Family Shares with ′At Least 70 Billion Won Premium′ Value per share increased from 4.58 million KRW to 5.19 million KRW within a year.

[Alpha Biz= Reporter Kim Youngtaek, Kim Jihyun] Recently, suspicions have been raised that NXC, an unlisted company, may have paid a premium to purchase shares from Yoo Jung-hyun, a member of the Nexon controlling family.

On the 19th, NXC, the holding company of the gaming company Nexon, acquired shares worth a total of 649.994 billion KRW from Yoo Jung-hyun, Chairperson of the Board (who holds 61,746 shares valued at 320.338 billion KRW), the widow of the late founder Kim Jung-ju, and their two children, Kim Jung-min and Kim Jung-yoon (who each hold 31,771 shares valued at 164.828 billion KRW).

Additionally, NXC purchased 3,122 shares of the affiliate company WiseKids held by the Yoo Jung-hyun family for 16.197 billion KRW, bringing the total transaction value to 666.2 billion KRW, according to a public disclosure.

This transaction is viewed as the company buying back shares from the controlling family at a large sum to help pay inheritance taxes.

Based on a comprehensive investigation by Alpha Biz on the 20th, the controlling family, including Chairperson Yoo Jung-hyun, sold a total of 125,288 shares to NXC for 649.994 billion KRW, which, when simply calculated, results in a per-share price of 5.19 million KRW.

In May of last year, the Yoo Jung-hyun family sold 852,190 shares of NXC (valued at approximately 4.7 trillion KRW) to the Korea Asset Management Corporation (KAMCO) via the government through a payment in kind method.

At that time, a 20% premium was applied, similar to the management rights premium. Without the premium and using the unlisted stock valuation formula, the value was approximately 3.9 trillion KRW.

This year, no premium was applied to the Yoo Jung-hyun family's share purchase. From this perspective, the pure NXC per-share value increased from 4.58 million KRW to 5.19 million KRW, a rise of approximately 600,000 KRW over the past year. In total, this amounts to approximately 75.1 billion KRW.

This has led to suspicions that NXC may have overestimated the value when purchasing the controlling family’s shares.

In fact, the government attempted to publicly sell NXC shares through KAMCO twice, but both times the sale failed as no bidders participated, even at the minimum bid of 4.7149 trillion KRW.

Regarding this matter, an NXC representative explained, "Nexon was included in the valuation of the holding company NXC, and Nexon’s valuation has increased over the past two years,” adding, “Comparing with companies like K and N is unreasonable due to NXC being unlisted, and internally, there is an assessment that NXC’s value should be much higher.”

[Exclusive] NXC Suspected of Purchasing Yoo Jung-hyun Nexon Family Shares with 'At Least 70 Billion Won Premium' Value per share increased from 4.58 million KRW to 5.19 million KRW within a year.