DeNA sets record with $359 million revenue

Revenue for third fiscal quarter marks 250 percent jump year-over-year; social gaming doesn't quit

DeNA, one of Japan’s largest mobile gaming companies, announced Wednesday its third quarter financial results and, as you’d expect for a social gaming company of DeNA’s magnitude, the results are astounding.

The company closed its third quarter with a record-setting $359 million in revenue, which marks a 250 percent jump from the same quarter a year before and the fifth consecutive quarter of increasing revenues. For the second fiscal quarter, the company had reported $336.4 million in revenue.

DeNA projects a $1.3 billion year when the period closes March 31, 2011. If that's how big social gaming is for just one company focused on one country, imagine what it could be for the global market.

Founded in 1999, DeNA operates a social gaming network called Mobage-Town, which boasts more than 24 million registered users. The company attributes much of its growing revenue to the growing diversity on the Mobage Open Platform, which currently houses 309 third-party developers offering 764 game titles.

Japan was one of the first countries to see widespread adoption of mobile phone Internet access--via feature phones--so DeNA has had a lot longer to fine-tune its network and perfect the art of selling virtual goods, strategies relatively new to U.S.-based companies targeting the smartphone market.

(If you’d like to read more about how Japan led the U.S. in the mobile social gaming revolution and see what DeNA has planned next, be sure to read my interview from last week with ngmoco founder Neil Young.)

Back in October, DeNA paid $400 million for ngmoco, a U.S.-based publisher of mobile games for iOS and Android. Today, DeNA announced that its integration with ngmoco is now complete and the new joined entity is planning to launch a global Mobage platform for smartphones this spring. Competition will be fierce; besides Apple’s own in-house Game Center, DeNA will have to go up against probably the biggest social game platform in the world, Facebook, home to behemoths like Zynga, Crowdstar and EA. But, on the other hand, Facebook has been slow to expand its third-party app offerings to mobile devices.

DeNA has also formed a partnership with Samsung to integrate Mobage directly into the manufacturer’s Android offerings, also set to launch internationally in the spring.