Asia’s Nexon sees Q1 game revenues rise 9% and profit grow 15%

Asian gaming giant Nexon reported that its first quarter revenues rose 9 percent to 52 billion yen ($436 million) thanks to good results with its existing games and its global expansion into mobile games. The results show the company is making some progress in its bid to become a global gaming company with significant operations in the West.

Nexon, which is based in Tokyo and has a lot of its operations in South Korea, said that it saw good performance for games in China and South Korea around the Lunar New Year celebrations during the quarter. Net income was 18.5 billion yen ($155.4 million), up 15 percent from a year earlier for the first quarter ended March 31.

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“Our solid first quarter performance again validates our ongoing strategic focus on quality,” said Owen Mahoney, the chief executive of Nexon, in a statement. “We are making steady headway on our strategy, and I am pleased with our execution in key geographies, including China, where Dungeon & Fighter updates and item sales were extremely well received, as well as Korea, where both PC online and mobile games delivered impressive results in a highly competitive market.”

He added, “We made several important announcements during the quarter, including a co-development deal with Square Enix to create a mobile version of Final Fantasy XI as well as Dungeon Fighter mobile, which will be published by Tencent in China. More recently, we announced the launch of DomiNations in the U.S. and Europe and are seeing positive early results. We expect strong momentum to accelerate as we continue to launch high-quality games throughout 2015 and beyond.”

DomiNations was created by Big Huge Games, a new mobile game studio headed by game veterans Tim Train and Brian Reynolds. It debuted in early April as one of the new breed of hardcore real-time strategy games that will challenge the dominance of the No. 1-ranked Clash of Clans on mobile. DomiNations has been lingering in the top-50 highest-grossing games, according to market researcher App Annie.

Nexon said that PC online game revenues were 43.6 billion yen ($366 million), up 8 percent year-over-year. Mobile game revenues were 8.4 billion yen ($70.5 million), up 16 percent year-over-year. Native games revenues were 4.6 billion yen ($38.6 million), which grew 2.8x compared to the previous year.

The company said it had lower-than-expected marketing and human resource expenses. As far as its outlook goes, Nexon said it expects second quarter revenues of 40.3 billion to 43 billion yen, mobile revneues of 10.2 billion to 11.2 billion yen, operating income of 8.8 billion to 11.1 billion yen, and net income of 7.2 billion to 9.5 billion yen.