We’ve written much about Japanese internet entertainment company CyberAgent (TYO:4751) over the past year, ranging from its many game offerings for smartphones and social platforms, to its ventures abroad setting up offices in Taiwan and Jakarta, to helping international smartphone developers make inroads in Japan.
The company recently announced its first quarter results, which saw net income up by nearly 40 percent. CyberAgent just published an online video presentation with slides about its first quarter, and I thought I’d share some highlights here.
One aspect of the CyberAgent’s business which we haven’t discussed much on here is Ameba, the company’s social networking service [1], which saw subscribers surpassed 20 million. The number of users on Ameba Pigg have passed the 10 million.
Looking at monthly page views for Ameba, you can see that its growth has been steady over the years, and indeed picked up some steam in 2011, with users beginning to access the services via smartphones.
While this chart indicates that such users aren’t really very significant right now, they represent the strongest potential for growth for CyberAgent, who expects page views from smartphones to rocket to 35 billion in 2013, up from 2.1 billion in September 2011 (see chart, lower right).
The company also noted that it plans to increase the number of full-time employees by 700 in 2012, more than half of which will be engineers, this on top of its current headcount of more than 2,000.
It will be interesting to watch and see CyberAgent continue to grow, both at home and abroad, over the course of 2012. For more information, I encourage you to check out the company’s full report.
-
It’s a little tricky to label Ameba as just a social networking service. It has blogging and microblogging platforms, as well as its virtual world Ameba Pigg/Pico. ↩