Drecom is a public company, specialized in making a blog tool. Drecom is viewed as a Web 2.0 company. Because they provide many RSS related services. Also they sponsor ‘Drecom Award on Rails’ which awards good Rails’ applications created by many participated developers.

Recently, Drecom’s financial activities are questioned by bloggers.

Drecom has IPOed with mere 238 million yen ($2 million) sales. And 61.8% of its sales are from Drecom’s share holders. This is not a excellent record.

Gree’s CFO, Aoyagi is publicly criticizing Drecom’s financial activity in his blog. Aoyagi said buying of a Hikari Tsushin subsidiary is very questionable. Also, Aoyagi forecasts cash insufficiency will bring a big trouble to Drecom.

Will it be a scandal? Can Drecom survive the coming year? I will keep an eye on Drecom.

Drecom:

• Type: public (3793)
• Founded: 2001 Nov.
• Public: 2006 Feb.
• Sales: 843 million yen (2007)
• Loss: 114 million yen (2007)
• Employee: 226+
• People: CEO, Yuuki Naito (born 1978)

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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Mobage town has been started in 2006 by Tomoko Namba, a Mckinsey alumna. “Mobage town” is short for “mobile game town”. So, Mobage provides numerous small games and a social network service for mobile phone users. Essentially users are using Mobage as a social network service.

The service has 7.4 million registered users and 13 billion page views per month. 47% of users are teenagers. 37% of users are in their twenties.

Mobage has a very clever growth/revenue model. Each user has an avatar. Avatar needs to be clothed. Clothings can be bought with a virtual money called ‘Mobagold’. Users can obtain Mobagold by registering to adviterser’s services. Its business model is similar to Korean network game site ‘Han game’.

Namba started a company ‘DeNA’ in 1999 as an Internet auction service company. Soon, Yahoo! Japan became a clear winner in Japanese Internet auction market. Her company experienced a long slump. In 2005, DeNA gained a certain success with mobile commerce services, and successfully IPOed to Tokyo stock market.

Mobage’s huge success boosted the company’s profit. DeNA’s revenue reached 14 billion yen, and a profit is 2.5 billion yen.

See also:

1. Company’s site (in English)
2. Mobage town article with screen shots (in Japanese)

DeNA:

• Type: public (JP:2432)
• Founded: Mar. 1999
• Went public: Feb. 2005
• Sales: 14 billion yen ($129 million)
• Profit: 2.5 billion yen ($23 million)
• Employee: 415
• People: CEO, Tomoko Namba

Tags: Japan, Service by Shunichi Arai
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