Asiasoft turns attention to mobile game platform to recover from revenue slide

Chief executive officer Pramote Sudjitporn said 30 per cent of its revenue this year would come from mobile games.

If the strategy to focus more on mobile platforms is successful, this year’s revenue will recover to the Bt1.7 billion it posted in 2013, while retaining existing users of personal-computer game titles.

Because of flat growth from PC games, while revenue growth from mobile games is expected to double this year, the company aims to launch at least eight mobile games into the Thai market. "Last year, we had only Raknarok Ragnarok Mobile. But it contributed 10 per cent of our revenue," Pramote said.

Last year, there were around 14.7 million gamers in Thailand. Around 8.3 million gamers spending in the game that was worth around US$230 million, around 31 per cent of this contributed from mobile platform.

Apart from launching new mobile games, the company also plans to launch a regional mobile game platform called Playpark to allow Asiasoft’s gamers across Southeast Asia to play together with using the same game wallet. Currently, it has 120 million gamer IDs across the region in six countries, namely Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and the Philippines.

It also plans to collaborate with Line to launch a game called Dragonica over the chat application in those six countries, which have 85 million Line users. "Line is a leading platform for launching games on a massive scale. Line’s games are successful, with the minimum download of 18 million, while the highest download is 25 million. Revenues will be shared," Pramote said. The mobile game market in Thailand is showing healthy growth, but only four or five of the games are published by Thai innovators.

"This year, around 60 per cent of our revenue will come from overseas," Pramote said.

He said that last year, Asiasoft Corporation saw its revenue slump by 26 per cent.

The main causes were a shift of gamers from the PC to the mobile platform; investments in acquiring and building a mobile game platform; and write-offs of unsuccessful game stocks.

"This year, we aim to grow by 30 per cent to come back to where we were in 2013. And we also aim to get back [eventually] to Bt2 billion, where we were in 2012 before we went down a year later. Mobile games are our engine of growth."

The company also plans to launch Pal+, which will function as a forum and chat application as well as a mobile-game store.

"Overall this year, we are investing Bt100 million in mobile game infrastructure and game licences.

"This year, according to this plan, our revenue will grow by 30 per cent while net profile profit will grow by 15 per cent," Pramote said.