Japanese Social Mobile Games Company DeNA To Hit $1.3 Billion In Revenue

Japan’s leading social games company, DeNA (listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with a $5.4 billion market cap), is running from one record to the other. The company, whose mobile social gaming platform Mobage-town boasts over 22 million users in Japan, issued its operating results reported [PDF] for the third financial quarter today.
In this time frame, DeNA’s revenue reached $359 million, up 153% from the same quarter in fiscal 2009 and up 9% from Q2. The company’s operating profit grew 182% year-on-year to $181 million (up 8% from Q2).
DeNA is projecting revenue for the entire fiscal year to reach $1.3 billion (up from $590 million last year) and operating profit to grow from $260 to $675 million. It’s tough to make comparisons with Zynga (which doesn’t publish financial data), but even big Z shouldn’t be able to match these numbers, at least not this year.
In a nut shell, Mobage-town is like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one – exclusively available through mobile phones registered in Japan. The site currently boasts 764 games offered by over 300 companies.
90% of DeNA’s revenue and profits come from Mobage-town (sales of virtual items, avatar-related sales, ads etc.). In other words, the company is expecting over $1 billion in revenue to be generated by mobile phone users and in Japan only.
These are mind-boggling numbers, especially when you consider that the company is sharing Japan’s mobile social gaming market with a big competitor that follows the same business model, GREE (which is also listed and boasts a market cap of $3.7 billion itself).
DeNA is currently trying hard to diversify its product and business strategy, with a focus on bringing Mobage-town to international markets this year.
The latest moves include acquiring San Francisco-based mobile games maker ngmoco for up to $400 million, expanding its game platform to PCs (through a collaboration with Yahoo Japan) and inking a deal with Samsung to have Mobage-town pre-installed on every Samsung smartphone ships from spring this year.
We will keep you posted.

Source: Techcrunch