Chinese freemium game publisher Perfect World announced its Q1 earnings today, reporting $62.2 million according to Redline China. This is a 1.8% increase from revenues reported in Q4 2008 and a 40.2% increase year-over-year. It's another signal that the Chinese freemium game market remains healthy and resistant to the global economic downturn that is negatively impacting Chinese Web advertising revenues. The company's net income for the quarter was $31.5 million, up 72.6% from Q4 '08 and 36.1% from Q1 '08.
What's interesting about these figures is that while revenue is up, peak concurrent users is actually down. For Q1 '09, Perfect World reported 615,000 concurrent users. That compares to 690,000 in Q4 '08 and 660,000 in Q1 '08. Perfect World attributes the drop in peak concurrent users to seasonal elements -- as Q1 contains several major Chinese holidays -- and an aggressive anti-cheating campaign that would have necessarily driven a certain percentage of users away.
ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) for Perfect World in Q1 '09 was 244RMB, or about $35.74. That's up 8.1% from Q4 '08 and 61.6% from Q1 '08. Perfect World attributes the increase in revenue from Q4 '08 to Q1 '09 to a series of successful in-game promotions for sales of virtual goods.
Perfect World projects Q2 '09 revenues to fall in a range between $60.1 and $63.6 million, essentially expecting no more than a 2% change up or down in current figures. Right now user churn is a major concern for Perfect World, so it intends to scale back on the number of sales promotions in the upcoming quarter. It is also expecting to incur higher marketing and operating expenses than usual, which could narrow profit margins.
The Perfect World figures are interesting in terms of how enormously consistent they are with the results recently reported by competitor Changyou. In fact, reported revenues are in the same range. While the Changyou reports did not include projections for Q2 '09, it seems likely that company's future performance will also fall into the same range as Perfect World's.
No comments:
Post a Comment