Asiajin

Gree (TSE:3632) and Paperboy (JASDAQ:3633) went public on December 17th and 19th respectively as we reported before.

Gree’s IPO price is 3,300yen ($33) per share. On 17th, Gree stock opened with 5,000yen ($50), and closed with 4,800yen ($48). Its market capitalization, 107 billion yen ($1B), is larger than Mixi (TSE:2121).

Gree issued 1.2 million new shares and raised 3.96 billion yen ($39M), and existing share holders sold 2.83 million shares with 9.339 billion yen ($93M).

Paperboy’s IPO price is 1,900yen ($19). On 19th, its stock price doubled IPO price with 4,000yen ($40) initial opening price. Its market capitalization is much smaller 5 billion yen ($50M).

See Also:

* Japan networking site stock soars 45 pct in debut | Reuters

Tags: Company, Japan by Shunichi Arai
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So-net M3 (TSE:2413) is a very profitable and unique company which is providing a community site ‘m3.com’ exclusively for medical doctors.

Doctors are restricted by confidentiality, so they cannot use typical community sites to share information about their professional life or skills. M3 provides them with a bulletin board service.

M3 has 390,000 registered medical professionals, and 162,000 of their registered users are medical doctors.

M3 reported 7.4 billion yen ($74M) revenue, and 3.4 billion yen ($34M) in pre-tax profits for FY2008. They earned this large amount of profit with only 50 employees and 6 executives (as of March, 2008). [1]

The company’s main revenue comes from providing marketing tools to pharmaceutical companies. M3 enables sales people to reach doctors through the site, instead of bothering doctors with frequent office visits.

M3’s other businesses are job search [JP], clinical trial matching, Q&A sites for patients (AskDoctors [JP]), Doctors Blog [JP], business consulting services for new practitioners [JP], and general advertisements.

M3 acquired MDLinx, a US-based medical community site for 950 million yen ($9.5M) in 2006. M3 is also invested in the Korean market through a company called Medi C&C.

So-net M3 is a subsidiary of So-net Entertainment (TSE:3789). So-net Entertainment is an Internet service provider, and a subsidiary of Sony (TSE:6758, NYSE:SNE).

1. FY2008 financial report [PDF] [JP]

Tags: Company, Event Report, Japan, New Service, Service, Technology, Trend by Shunichi Arai
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