DeNA Co., Ltd. (TYO:2432)
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May 7, 2026, 1:45 PM JST
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Earnings Call: Q3 2024

Feb 7, 2024

Koji Yoshida
CFO, DeNA Co.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our earnings results presentation for the third quarter of fiscal year 2023. Let us begin with the presentation of the operating results briefing materials. First, I will start with our financial results summary. In the financial results summary, first, please look at our IFRS results. We recorded an impairment loss, et cetera. I will go into more detail about this on the next slide. We have maintained the level of revenue performance for the April to December period of fiscal year 2023, year-over-year, as you can see on the right, showing the progress of strengthening our portfolio. Looking at Non-GAAP Operating Profit, excluding one-time factors, we expect to have an operating profit for the full fiscal year.

As I mentioned a moment ago, I would like to go into more detail about the summary of the impairment loss, et cetera, recorded in Q3. Since fiscal year 2021, DeNA has been pursuing the strengthening of our portfolio. On this occasion, we conducted a review of our strategy and business progress, and reviewed our outlook and future plans. To briefly review what we have been doing in the almost three years since fiscal year 2021 began, in the first year, we prioritized investment for future growth and taking on challenges. In the second year, we updated our strategy and made significant progress in strengthening our business portfolio, while also leveraging M&A. We are continuing our efforts to further grow our strengthened business portfolio and enhance the earnings base to achieve the structural shift for Serve to contribute about the same level of profit as Entertain.

On this occasion, we reviewed our outlook based on our current state of progress and reviewed our outlook and future plans. As a result of this, we decided to make major changes in the China business within the game business. I'll discuss some of the issues we have faced here later. In our review, we carried out the impairment test for cash-generating units upon identifying signs of impairment losses, and recorded impairment losses, et cetera, in Q3. The summary is as shown on the slide. These losses are one-time and did not involve cash out, so there is no impact on our financial base. I will go into further detail on the following pages. Next are the financial results by segment.

I will provide more information about each business later in the presentation, but I will mention here that for the April to December period of fiscal year 2023, we saw good growth in live streaming, sports, and healthcare and medical. However, we recognize that there are challenges in the game business. Here is the cost and expense breakdown. I have nothing in particular to add to what is already on the slide. Please take a look at your convenience. Now, I would like to go into more detail about each of the businesses. First, we will start with businesses under our Entertain approach. I'll start with our Games results. Contribution from new titles was limited in Q3, and we had impact from amortization, marketing, and other related expenses.

In Q4, we expect to have reduced impact of those factors and typical seasonal strength in existing titles, and thus we expect to have a segment profit for both Q4 and the full year in the Game business. However, given the situation, we have deliberated on the future approach for the Game business and have some matters to share. One such matter is the review of the China development and live operations structure. As you may know, there have been environmental changes in China, and we recognize there have been increasing issues in recent years. Therefore, we are conducting a major review of the position of our China business. In parallel, we are significantly downsizing the China office. I'd like to go into some more detail about the background for this decision. First, there is the market environment surrounding our China business.

There have been frequent environmental changes for the Game business, including tightened regulations. As you may know, there were periods of time when licenses to launch new games were effectively frozen, and there has been news flow at various times about regulating aspects of gameplay for minors. Then, at the end of last year, there were announcements about a range of strict regulations for online gaming. The details about the specifics do not appear to have been finalized, but we can assume that whatever the content ends up being, it is likely to make game operations more difficult and impose greater restrictions. In this environment, we face repeated delays owing to external factors, and we have to update our forecasts, meaning that the need to manage and reduce our risks in performance and development has grown. There are also challenges in business operations.

Compared to when we first entered the market and set up our China office, the game development and live operations costs have been growing. In this situation, we need to rationalize our new development structure and related costs. As you will probably be familiar, there has been a lot of reporting on the impact of the Zero-COVID Policy and other business restrictions. Considering all of these factors, as I mentioned earlier, we have decided to conduct a major review of the position of the China business, and a significant downsizing of the China office is underway. Given everything I've described so far, for the game business, going forward, we are pursuing our strategy centered on major IP for the global market, in line with our strategy to date, and centering on teams in Japan. We are continuing in these efforts.

We have talked about our history of working on many titles with partner companies, and we continue to consider this a strength for DeNA. We have new titles in the works for next fiscal year and beyond. We also have approximately 3 titles from this strategy planned for next fiscal year, fiscal year 2024. In addition, during our IR Day in November last year, we talked about exploring a new approach with significantly reduced development risk. We have talked about our core competence and our live operations on many occasions, including these briefings, and our aim here is to establish a new development method that leverages our live operations capabilities.

To reiterate, we put the game out to market early, rather than trying to get all the development done, as in conventional large-scale development, and through live operations, we analyze the user response, do further development, and polish the game. We can assess performance during our frequent milestones, which enables us to control our development costs, and when we identify a title that is succeeding, we can allocate more development resources towards it. This will enable us to be flexible. Going forward, we hope to share more detail about this approach. Next is the live streaming business results. In this business, we are prioritizing revenue growth, and as you can see, we expect to have year-over-year revenue growth and profitability for fiscal year 2023.

For Global Pococha, as a result of verification of the appropriate operations for each region, we plan to end service in the U.S. in February 2024. Now, I would like to examine each of our services. First, Pococha Japan. We are continuing our efforts to bolster user engagement and aiming to achieve greater efficiency in new user acquisition. We had 5.54 million downloads as of December 31, 2023, and we had the highest ever monthly sales for Pococha Japan in December 2023. So this service continues to see solid performance. Next is IRIAM, which is a newer area in live streaming for us. As you can see on the graphs, IRIAM has achieved 2.65 million downloads and achieved their highest ever DAU level.

These are just some examples of the active use we are seeing, clearly showing the strong need for this service from users. On the other hand, we want to maximize the potential for the power of this service and business development, or in other words, make sure the community develops in a sound way and ensure the foundation for the service. For this reason, we are taking more time with monetization initiatives and user acquisition than we originally planned. Our highest priority is the sound development of the community, and we are taking care to ensure it. For this reason, financial performance is expected to take more time than anticipated when Allm was brought into the DeNA group, but we are continuing to focus on revenue growth and bottom line improvement. This is an important service, and we are taking care in our approach. That's the update here.

That concludes the Entertain approach. Next, I will share about the various businesses in our Serve approach. First, we have our sports business. This business was significantly impacted by COVID-19, but fortunately, we have recovered, and we have achieved even further growth. On the slide, we have our April to December performance for each fiscal year, and as you can see, we have achieved our highest ever level of segment performance this fiscal year. In this area, we are proactively exploring and promoting mid to long-term business opportunities, not limited to sports game performance, such as Machizukuri initiatives. In our view, this is a growth area business with the power to contribute to overall group performance. Next is the healthcare and medical business results, an important part of our Serve approach that we are working to grow.

First, we have the results. Our cumulative performance through Q3 is showing steady trends, with revenue of JPY 6.6 billion, which is up 73% year-over-year. This is also shown in the graph on the left. We expect to achieve segment profitability in Q4. Now, I will take each area of the business in turn. First, the healthcare area. We have two focus areas here. One is the data health area, where we provide services to support data health PDCA for insurers such as local municipalities and health insurance societies. The other is data use, where we have pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies as our customers, and we aim to use health big data in such a way as to contribute to the public good. These are the two major pillars for the healthcare area. The table on the right lays out our progress clearly.

Under data health, this year, fiscal year 2023, is the formulation year for the Japanese government Data Health Plan, so naturally, local municipalities are formulating their plans, and this contributed to solid progress for us. The number of orders from municipal National Health Insurance has grown from 351 last fiscal year to 469 this fiscal year. Below that, we have data use. We expect strong seasonality towards Q4, so please look forward to our performance next quarter. But for now, we are seeing solid KPIs. The number of clients grew from 28 to 54. The transaction volume per customer grew 22.8% year-over-year, and revenue also more than doubled year-over-year. Now, it is important for us to deliver the expected results in Q4. That concludes the healthcare area. Now, I will move on to the medical area.

The main focus here is Allm, a company that joined the DeNA group. Allm offers a number of services, but the doctor-to-doctor communication platform, JOIN, was identified for particular focus when we brought Allm into the group. We are currently working to expand JOIN, and that expansion has been going well. We have examples of deployment to medical institutions through local municipality subsidies, et cetera, expanding into 10 prefectures, which shows our steady progress. The number of facilities using JOIN has reached 416, with a growth pace higher than last fiscal year. Going forward, we plan to evolve as a platform and expand our business areas. But to go into more detail, we have this.

During the IR Day last year, we used this slide to describe the various different ways that JOIN as a communication platform can be used, and the potential business opportunities that could come from that use. Before joining the DeNA group, Allm was engaging with individual core hospitals who are part of standard medical care. They also worked with high-level and specialist medical providers to enable communication with the standard medicine providers. For rural and developing country areas, as well as regional-related hospitals and other facilities, a different kind of use came into play. Namely, the National Center Second Opinion Platform and Advanced Care Unit. Coordination has already begun between the National Cancer Center Japan and central hospitals. This marks the completion of the first remote treatment support system for regional medicine in Japan. This system also has potential to be leveraged globally.

The areas for further evolution are in orange on the right. This is JOIN Mobile Care, a remote treatment package. By linking JOIN, the communication platform, and IoT portable medical devices, it becomes possible to deliver a remote treatment package that can be delivered in the field without needing to rely on medical facilities. We believe that this solution could be effective not only in emergency situations, such as disaster-stricken areas, but also in remote islands, developing countries, and other areas where medical resources are insufficient. JOIN Mobile Care does not rely on medical facilities. Rather, it creates a virtual treatment facility. We believe there are significant needs for such a remote treatment solution in doctor-less or nearly doctor-less villages, both in Japan and globally, as well as for natural disasters and other emergencies.

We are making steady progress in projects to lead to mid- to long-term growth in this fiscal year and beyond, and I am sure going forward, there will be an opportunity to go into more detail. We have now gone through our businesses in the Entertain and Serve approaches. Finally, we have our outlook. Full-year revenue is expected to increase year-over-year in conjunction with changes to and strengthening of the business portfolio. For full-year non-GAAP operating profit, excluding one-time losses, we expect an operating profit. However, for all the profit levels in IFRS at the operating profit, loss, level and below, we expect to record losses due to the impairment losses, et cetera. For the game business, we expect year-over-year decreases in both revenue and profit.

However, the other businesses are growing, and there is no change to the major factors related to performance announced at the beginning of the fiscal year. We are making progress in strengthening the business portfolio along with growth in each business and appropriate reviews. In the Entertainment approach, especially in the game business, we aim to reduce the risk of volatility. Fundamentally, this will be key. Meanwhile, in the service approach, we aim to build high-quality services, have them penetrate, build up financial performance, and grow on an overall basis. This concludes my presentation for the third quarter of fiscal year 2023. Thank you for your attention.

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