GREE Quarterly Financials Dip Once Again, But Company Foresees Recovery Trend

GREE, Tokyo Game Show 2012

Japanese mobile social gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) announced its FY2013 first quarter financial results yesterday, with net sales and operating profit both down for a second consecutive quarter.

These results are not far off from an article published earlier in the month from The Nikkei [1] which reported as much. A GREE representative tells us this morning that the company’s sales have increased in both August and September, and that they are confident that there is a trend towards a recovery.

The company’s labor cost has been rising of late, due to its ever-expanding global operations, and there are also effects from global games that fell behind schedule. I understand that GREE plans to continue its already aggressive marketing in order to reach its goals.

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Yesterday the company also announced a partnership with SingTel for mobile games in Singapore, as well as an initiative to expand its HTML5 compatibility for the GREE platform. Regarding this latter point, our friend Serkan Toto has an interesting take on why this could be the wrong approach. Go check it out. I’m not a developer, so I’m not really sure if this is the wrong approach or not. My guess would be that eliminating any obstacles between them and the user’s money would be a plus.