By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry

Report: GREE Likely To See First Quarterly Loss Since 2008 IPO [Social Games]

R

Business daily The Nikkei reports that GREE‘s operating profit for the April-June 2012 quarter has dropped by 20% q-o-q to around US$255 million.

That would still be an increase of over 100% y-o-y (and an incredible number by itself), but the number would mean that GREE saw, for the first time since its IPO in 2008, a quarter-on-quarter decline.

The Nikkei has also learned that sales have seemed to drop around 10% q-o-q to US$537 million.

Good news for GREE: according to the report, GREE’s operating profit will likely stand at around US$1.07 billion for the entire fiscal year (ending in June 2012), up 170% and in the projected range of US$1.02 billion and US$1.15 billion. This was anticipated a few days ago by GREE CEO Yoshikazu Tanaka and isn’t a big surprise.

US$1.07 billion profit: almost entirely with social games, on mobile phones only, and basically in Japan only.

The Nikkei notes that this number is higher than that of e-commerce behemoth Rakuten (80 million users in Japan alone), which ended its fiscal year in December 2011 with US$0.9 billion in profit.

 

About the author

Dr. Serkan Toto

I am the CEO & Founder of Kantan Games Inc., an independent consultancy focused on Japan’s game industry.

Please feel free to connect via Email (Serkan at kantangames.com), LinkedIn or Twitter.

Please subscribe to updates on this site via Email.

By Dr. Serkan Toto – On Japan's Game Industry