Coffee Chat: Tatsuo Tsutsumi Tells What GREE Ventures is Doing in Southeast Asia

This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), TechInAsia’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here.

Tatsuo Tsutsumi Director of GREE Ventures Investment Office and Noritaka Kobayashi, head of APAC business development at GREE.

Summary

This post will be updated with a summary once the session has concluded. Until then, check out our liveblog below.

Liveblog

#14:16: [On how startups can reach them] Please just email us, or if you see us around the event please don’t hesitate to chat with us

#14:14: So far in Southeast Asia, if you talk about games everyone talks online or console games. But everyone understands that this market will rapidly [decline]. There are many gaming companies, and they can benefit from our experience in the industry.

#14:08: [Willis asks about GREE’s investment in gaming companies] NK: GREE has an investment section, and part of my mission is investment and we have another team in Tokyo involved with investment. The GREE platform has many functions, like gaming, social network, and others. So to help strengthen our overall platform we are considering even services like messaging applications.

#14:08: [Which Asia country is your first priority? Vietnam?] NK: Vietnam is one of our priorities, but it depends on the companies. We have met with 30 or 40 and we’re talking to them. My first priority is negotiation with them.

#14:06: We are integrating the GREE and Open Feint platform into one, which will be released between April and June. We’re now looking for good game developers for this platform. Our strategy could be to distribute or to acquire their games. Currently our staff has 90 percent engineers, about 900 engineers. They can consult to developers, how to operate their games.

#14:02: TT: We haven’t yet, but soon we are planning to invest in some. I’m very interested in ecommerce companies, for example payment solutions. [Willis, can you mention some startups you want to invest in?] TT, with a smile, declines to say.

#14:01: TT: GREE ventures is a purely financial venture capital group. We plan to invest not only in games but all internet properties. So it’s different from GREE Inc in that way. The fund is worth $25 million.