CyberAgent, Inc. (TYO:4751)
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May 7, 2026, 3:30 PM JST
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Earnings Call: Q1 2025

Jan 29, 2025

Operator

We would like to now begin CyberAgent's FY 2025 Q1 earnings briefing. This session will be video streamed. With respect to the content we will be sharing today, please refer to the disclaimer included in our presentation material. Our CEO, Fujita, will be taking you through the earnings briefing.

Thank you very much.

Susumu Fujita
CEO, CyberAgent

This is Fujita. I would like to take you through the first quarter financial results. Our financial year ends in September, so this fiscal year has begun in October and will end in December. Overall, we're doing well. Our sales have increased by 5.6% year-on-year, and OP has increased by 32.1% year-on-year. With respect to the media business, we changed our business segmentation, and now it is called media and IP. Our OP increased by JPY 2.2 billion year-on-year, so it's a significant increase. The advertising business grew by 11.8%; sales grew by 11.8% year-on-year, and our OP increased by 6.1%. In the game business, there are some titles that did not perform as well, although we released new games, so the OP has decreased slightly. Overall, consolidated sales grew by 5.6% year-on-year.

We have done one-fourth of our annual plan, so we are doing well. With the OP, as I mentioned before, we increased the OP by 32%, so it has increased significantly. With respect to the SG&A, there aren't any major topics here. It is trending on track, well, steadily as well. With the number of employees, these are the trends that we usually see. In the first quarter, we're seeing the similar trends as last fiscal year. This is the P&L. There weren't any major changes to the balance sheet either. Against our forecast for this fiscal year, the sales target is JPY 820 billion, and OP is JPY 442 billion. Every year, we are trying to increase revenue and profits.

Last year, we had our package games were a bigger hit than we expected, and so we revised our targets a little bit upward. That is why it's not an even step that you see here, but this fiscal year as well, we remain committed to increasing revenue and profits. This is our achievement. Sales, we have achieved 24.9%. Operating profit, we've achieved 19.8%. Every year, first quarter tends to be a little bit weaker, but with an OP progress of 20%, we believe that we are on track and doing well against the target. Now moving on to the individual segments, first starting with media and IP. We have continued to add to our sales year-on-year. We've grown by 10.5%. With respect to operating profit, we have booked JPY 1.4 billion, so we have started to enter a phase where we're contributing to operating profits.

We, with respect to ABEMA, are still booking losses, but we are gradually decreasing the amount of loss. With respect to ABEMA's WAU, we don't really put a lot of effort into our end of the year, beginning of the year holiday season, but despite that, we are still seeing great results in WAU. When we look at the attributes of the users on demand, it's nearly 40% of our on-demand viewership. Due to these trends, in response to these trends, we are enforcing and focusing our production investment in anime, but we are further amplifying our efforts in this area. We have Project Sekai Movie that's already in the movie theaters, and there are more titles that are in our lineup that we hope that you will look forward to.

This slide, we call it the media and IP business, and these are segmented to the IP business. So we launched ABEMA in 2016, and we have been expanding the IP business gradually since then, and we have entered various fields, various genres, but we launched CygamesPictures, and we have already received great feedback. So we launched CygamesPictures 2016. We're getting great feedback, and we've had newly launched CASOA, an anime production company. We do have a lot of ABEMA users, and we're trying to create and monetize mainly games, but IPs to add to our profitability. So we have a structure in place that will leverage our group synergy. Over the mid to long term, we want to expand this area, this business. Moving on to the internet advertising business, the internet advertising business has continued to grow steadily, expands steadily.

We have grown by double digits. It is quite a volume already, but it's grown significantly at 11.8%. We are continuing to expand this business. With respect to OP, we've grown by 6.1%, and OPM has been flat, however, for some time, but over the mid to long term, we are implementing many measures that will help us increase OPM in the future. One of the key initiatives includes implementation and operation of AI. We have made a lot of upfront investments in this advertising business and AI. If this starts to bear fruit, we believe that we will be able to improve the OPM of our advertising business. Moving on to the game business. This quarter, if we just look at this quarter, it seems as though we have decreased our sales and profits. OP has decreased by 4.1%.

As I mentioned before, some titles did well, sometimes those did not, so the mix has changed, but in FY 2025, we have pushed back some releases, but Chiikawa will be released quite soon, and anime, Sakamoto Days is a very big hit right now, but we will be releasing this spring as well. We want to, of course, start providing six new titles, including international versions, this fiscal year. Moving on lastly to the mid- to long-term strategy, so before FY 2024, we invested our profits from internet and game business into the media business to nurture Abema to become one of our key pillar businesses, and going forward, we have a lot of great user base for the media business, so we want to create great globally significant IPs and expand into the global market. That concludes my explanation of the first quarter of this fiscal year.

This concludes CyberAgent's FY 2025 first quarter earnings briefing. Should you have any questions, please contact the IR team. Thank you very much for watching today.

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