GREE Continues Overseas Investment Taking Minority Stake in eBuddy

GREE booth, 2012 Tokyo Game Show

It looks as though Japanese gaming giant GREE (TYO:3632) is continuing its activities overseas, this time with investment in chat service eBuddy, based in the Netherlands. The Next Web cites Emerce.nl, reporting that this investment actually occurred a few months back, but had not been reported until recently.

We got in touch with a GREE representative who confirmed that there was indeed a minority investment, although further details haven’t been disclosed.

Most of GREE’s high profile activity of late has been in the US and North America, making a push to partner with game developers there. As for Europe, the company does have subsidiaries in the region with offices in London and Amsterdam.

It has been interesting to watch GREE’s overseas expansion in contrast to its rival DeNA, which has been pushing its Mobage platform hard in China over the past year. Interestingly, GREE appears to be hiring for a number of positions in Beijing, so perhaps it will follow suit with a more focused China push sometime soon. The company announced 12 additional languages for the GREE platform yesterday, including traditional and simplified Chinese — although this had been known to be in the works for some time now.

When we last checked in on eBuddy, the company had about 250 million chat users worldwide, including 4 million in India, and 2 million in Indonesia.