BREAKING: GREE’s Financial Report Suggests It’s Japan’s Biggest Social Network Now
Japan’s mobile gaming giant GREE just released [PDF] their financial report for the April-June quarter, and it seems the company is running from one record to the next. Year-on-year, all relevant financial numbers have gone up, as did the number of page views and, more importantly, registered members.
Here’s a summary of GREE’s financial report, which suggests that GREE, not Mixi, is now Japan’s biggest social network.*
Registered members
For most people, this is probably the biggest news item: in the report, GREE says they had 21.25 million members at the end of July. This number puts them above the 21.02 million members Mixi claims [PDF] for the same point in time (we reported). At the end of July last year, GREE counted 13.54 million users.
Page views
Thanks to the introduction of new casual browser games, GREE’s page views went through the roof. In June this year, the site saw 35.4 billion page views (plus another 400 million on its PC site), up from 28.1 billion just a month earlier. By way of comparison: In July 2009, GREE registered 21.5 billion page views.
Financials
Sales in the past quarter more than doubled from around $60 million to now $127 million (+113%, to be more exact). GREE made $104 million from collecting fees from users (in the same quarter last year, it was “just” $46.1 million), and $23 million from ads. Operating profit increased 101% to $61.6 million.
For the whole fiscal year (that ended in June), revenue hit $408 million, up 153% from the year before. The operating profit increased 134% to $226 million.
GREE predicts that for the fiscal year ending June 2011, sales will balloon to $629 to $699 million yen and that operating profit will be somewhere between $314 and $349 million.
User data
GREE says 52% of its users are male. 34% are in their twenties, 26% in their thirties, and 22% are 19 or younger. What’s interesting is that 18% of users are 40 years or older.
Future developments
In the financial report, GREE also announces a 5-for-1 stock split for September 30 and that the company will open offices outside Japan by June 2011 (the end of GREE’s fiscal year).
*Addendum:
We know that some people question if GREE can really be called a social network as its focus isn’t necessarily the social element but gaming and as Mixi is the only Japanese service that gives users access to their “real social graph”. GREE officially calls itself an SNS (social networking service).
Find all Asiajin articles related to GREE here.
[Update]
What Are Japan’s Top 5 Social Services? Here’s A Quick Overview.
Facebook is sidelined in Japan as social network battle heats up | The Japan Times Online
