DeNA reports $336.4 million in Q2 revenue

Japanese mobile social gaming network calls out Facebook, Zynga for only earning a fraction of that

DeNA Co., Ltd., one of the largest mobile social game networks in Japan, released Thursday its fiscal second quarter results, and they are good. The Tokyo-based company realized $336.4 million in revenue, up 216 percent from the same quarter last year, and is projecting $1.25 billion in revenue for the year.

DeNA earned headlines in the tech world a month ago for acquiring San Francisco-based iOS game developer ngmoco for $400 million. When it was still a startup, ngmoco launched numerous popular titles, including Rolando, Eliminate and, more recently, Godfinger.

Already a well-known name in the social game industry, DeNA seems poised for a takeover of the global market with solid revenue growth, a healthy acquisition and (didn’t see this one coming) aggressive statements targeting two of America’s biggest social companies. DeNA says it makes, on average, 30 times as much as revenue as does Facebook and 15 times as much as does Zynga, per user.

Considering that Facebook revenue is estimated to be $1 billion this year and that Zynga’s revenue approaches that number, depending on who you ask, this is big talk from DeNA. Oddly enough, DeNA, unlike Facebook and Zynga, is a publicly traded company. While estimates surely abound, nobody really knows how much Facebook and Zynga are making.

That’s not stopping DeNA from picking on both Silicon Valley darlings for only doing half the work of one uber-successful Japanese corporation:

“While Facebook is solely a social networking site and Zynga is exclusively a gaming site, DeNA combines aspects of social networking and gaming.”

True enough, but it’s not like Facebook and Zynga are working against each other. Quite the opposite. In the spring, they sealed a five-year partnership together that Facebook has been repeating left and right with a variety of different game developers.

DeNA obviously is not a novice at what it does, so it could definitely make some serious strides in international markets, even in the United States. But Facebook and Zynga will not be easily toppled in those countries where the first of the two has already enlisted a massive quantity of users to its social network.

In mid-June, DeNA contributed $27.5 million--worth an 83 percent stake--to a new venture capital fund called Incubate Fund No. 1 Limited Partnership, aimed at the social gaming industry in both Japan and the U.S.