Earlier today, Daum and Kakao, which merged into one company on October 1, shared their third quarter earnings reports. The two segments are still operating separately for now, so we’ll largely focus on Kakao’s side of the earnings in this article.
Daum-Kakao announced a total combined revenue of 221.8 billion won ($200 million USD), with profits of 30.759 billion won ($28 million USD). Overall revenue was down six percent year-on-year. Still, Kakao will largely be pushing the combined company forward, especially where KakaoGames are concerned. Out of Kakao’s 88 billion won ($88 million USD) in revenue, nearly 60 billion won (US$55 million) came from the games side alone. 30 billion won of the company’s total revenue was profit.
20 million active users currently utilize KakaoGames, and KakaoTalk still holds many of the top apps in South Korea. However, it’s control over the top 20 apps is down to 74.4 percent of the total apps, down from 87.9 percent last year. KakaoTalk is lacking support from many major publishers to design games for the platform and there’s also the backlash over privacy concerns within the country to consider as well as heated competition in the messaging games space.
KakaoTalk is available for most major platforms.