Thank you for joining the HC Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Sarah, and I'm an Investment Banking Analyst at HC Wainwright. We're very excited you can all join us for a productive day of one-on-one meetings, corporate presentations, and panels. For this session, we are thrilled to welcome Sebastian Koch, CEO, and Kenny Lin, CFO, from GCL Global Holdings, trading under the symbol GCL.
Thank you for taking the time. I'm Sebastian, the Group CEO, and with me is Kenny, my Group CFO. Today, I'm happy to bring you updates to GCL, where we've been listed since February of this year, but business has seen many milestones since the listing.
If you look at how we bring a full product layer to GCL, it's all about what you'll find in the modern household today. As a full ecosystem, we bring about content to the household. We bring about gaming, both in the physical format and in digital format, via our game development arm, game publishing arm, and the game distribution arm as well. With the strategic acquisition that you would have seen this year, we've also gone into gaming PC, peripherals, and also the hardware side of the business as well. As a full-fledged video gaming ecosystem, we operate across all verticals in the gaming industry, thereby being involved in a lot of modern households today. As we dive into the business, let's just look at the game distribution and the publishing arm of the business today.
I'm happy to say that for game distribution, our business has grown quite significantly. On the lower right-hand side, you'd see that in FY2023, we only sold 2.6 million units. FY2024, we sold 5 million units. In FY2025, which is the year ended March this year, we grew by 30% year-on-year, selling 6.5 million units of game in FY2025. On screen, you'd see some of the biggest IP that's been selling, not just in the region, but in the world. More often than not, big IPs that come into Asian markets, including China markets, it comes through GCL exclusively. As I've mentioned, in the biggest game of 2024, which is Black Myth: Wukong, I think we're happy to say that we were recognized as the exclusive global partner for Black Myth, where we brought every single physical copy into the rest of the world, into various channels, to various markets.
Every single physical copy and digital key that you would have bought from Black Myth came from GCL as well. When you look into the publishing business, now that's where the business has been seeing a hockey stick effect. The publishing business has been running for about three years now. In the cumulative number of games that we've published, we went from eight titles to 12 titles in FY2025, and that IP pipeline will continue to grow as well. In terms of the revenue for our game publishing unit, we grew by 367% year-on-year, and this was off the back of Black Myth, JDM, Stalker 2, which is an established IP as well. Game publishing continues to be an area of growth within the group, and this is still reinforcing the IP strategy of GCL as a group today.
Now, over the next few slides, I'm just going to show you some of the IP that we've signed, we've announced, and I'm happy to kind of showcase some of the IP as they are going to be looking to be quite big in nature as well. You might have seen an announcement where we invested into a game studio called Netcom Inc., where we are a 20% shareholder of Netcom, but at the same time, for this up-and-coming IP, Showa American Story, we are the global publisher as well. Showa American Story is shaping up to truly be an exciting IP that has gotten a lot of engagement from gamers worldwide. It's going to be a controversial but really interesting IP where, at the very core of the business, or at least at the very core of the game, it's a very fresh and novel way of storytelling.
When you look at the numbers, after the announcement of the trailer last November, we had more than 280 million views in one month alone. We were trending on various social media platforms, and we were the most viewed content on YouTube gaming channels, on Bilibili, and this became a big validation for us in understanding what the IP would become. When we look at Netcom Inc., which is the game studio's presence around various gaming conventions, similarly, we had seen that in the biggest gaming conventions over the last 12 months, like WePlay, China Joy, Netcom's founder, which is Mr. Loh, has been invited as the keynote speaker for some of the game conventions as well. The IP of Showa American Story is truly shaping up to be something that's quite interesting. Next, we have a few of the other IP.
We have Sword Sage Awakening, which has been featured in Gamescom Germany. It's an action RPG that focuses on dynamics, storytelling, and just the bringing of China culture out to the rest of the world. Similarly, for Realm of Ink, it's received a lot of good feedback, media coverage, and it's a fresh new spin on a roguelike category, which is similar to Hades, for those of you who've played on the Nintendo Switch platform. It's a similar game like Hades with a fresh new spin of culture and storyline as well. I'm glad to announce that in the past 72 hours, we made an announcement where we had invested into a game studio for the up-and-coming IP, The Defiant.
This IP is truly going to be exciting for us because, essentially, we are creating a AAA shooter FPS game that is going to be classified as the next Asian Call of Duty. The team behind the IP is an established team that has been working on some of the biggest FPS titles. The Defiant is basically a 1940s war game that features a lot of storytelling, heroic acts, personal sacrifices, and ultimately, it's just a fun game. When you look at the game, it shows the people who are eyes to develop, eyes to develop, that is set in sometimes in the 1940s. It's a very rich storyline for gamers who are a bit more familiar with the Call of Duty franchise.
I think the closest comparable would be Call of Duty Vanguard, where if you look, it focuses on the ability to sometimes warp through the way of the flames. In terms of the gameplay, we're quite happy that the gameplay and the narrative will be just as a case of reference, Call of Duty Vanguard actually sold a very good quality and survived the market. We're happy to say that in our business, if you looked at the media coverage around The Defiant, you would have seen that there has been a lot of media coverage, a lot of interviews on this IP as well.
In the recent media coverage for CGTN, The Defiant was the only game IP that was featured out of Hangzhou, where there were many video game developers that were promising, but The Defiant was the one IP that was selected for a full feature showcase as well. In the coming years, I think The Defiant will shape up to be an exciting IP that we are going to represent, not just as a shareholder, but as a global publisher as well. In terms of the timeline for GCL, I think what you would expect from the IP pipeline, you have Realm of Ink. We have an unannounced title that's private still, which is Underfold Divinity, our wholly owned subsidiary, which does game development and game publishing. You have Sword Sage, which I spoke about. You have Showa American Story, and you have The Defiant as well.
Along this pipeline, we still have some private titles that are unannounced. In the coming months, you will see some additional titles that will be populating our IP pipeline as well. Next, as we go into the other parts of the business, I want to touch a bit on the consumer electronic and hardware business. You would have seen that this was via a strategic acquisition this year, which we acquired Ban Leong Technologies Ltd. Ban Leong Technologies Ltd. is a Singapore-listed company that's heavily involved in consumer electronics and gaming hardware in Southeast Asia for the last three decades. Why would we buy a gaming hardware company? It's because Ban Leong Technologies Ltd. has been well positioned in some of the key products that matter over the last five years.
When you look at consumer electronics and gaming hardware, the rise in structural demand for gaming laptops, gaming PCs, servers, gaming graphic cards has been driven by the rise of AI companies, game developers, Web3 companies. Ban Leong Technologies Ltd. has been well positioned to be in this space, and the business has truly been stable and growing as well. The integration of a consumer electronics and gaming hardware business into GCL Global Holdings Ltd. further completes the ecosystem where we're now gaming software, gaming IP, and hardware as well. Through owning a pipeline of IP and a basket of IP, that's where we go into IP hardware collaboration, where we get to partner, we get to overlay our own IP on a series of hardware, create a whole collector's edition, and sell it at a high margin as well.
With collector's items, it's usually sold at a higher margin, smaller quantity, but it's a strategy to kind of build a user and a fan base around the IP as well. With the acquisition of Ban Leong Technologies Ltd., we build out this strategy on not just IP development, but building the peripherals that support the IP as well. Of course, with the gaming chair business in our group today, we're looking to kind of invigorate how gaming chairs would look like in the future by introducing different features like spatial audio and different functionalities as well. This is part of the gaming hardware business in which we're building out. Briefly talking about the financials, when you look at our FY2025 numbers, I'm happy to say that FY2025 was truly a milestone and a hallmark year for us. Revenue grew by 45.7% year-on-year. Gross profit grew by 59.5% year-on-year.
Net income grew by 350% year-on-year. EBITDA grew by 980% year-on-year. The acquisition of Ban Leong Technologies Ltd. is an FY2026 event. On a fully blended pro forma basis, our revenue is tracking towards $300 million already. Just to add on, I think you can see within six months of listing, we almost doubled our size with a memo for the last supply chain of hardware that fully integrates across this vertical of games development, publishing, distribution, and hardware, further strengthening the base of the GCL Global Holdings Ltd. corporation.
On a pro forma basis, we're expected to grow a lot more because with the integration of a hardware business today, with a fresh new spin of IP collaboration, new geographical markets, and naturally just a fresh introduction of B2C channels via GCL, that's where you get better efficiency in the numbers that we're putting forth as well. Looking at the mix as well, I think with the hardware business today, the group is more diversified than ever. On the left-hand side of the chart, you see that the blue, the purple, and the yellow parts of the business represent the gaming IP business, and the orange part represents the hardware business. With a well-diversified portfolio, you can expect that in any macroeconomic cycles, you would have different parts of the business that would still be considered stable today.
It is of the nature of a U.S.-listed company where we aim to have a very stable and strong bedrock of financial numbers while we're creating the outperformance to the IP play as well. Just to cap it off, we'll go through some of the strategy. GCL is still very focused on IP because when you have good IP, the writing is on the wall. Gaming, entertainment, and media, they're all converging. When you look at some of the biggest IP on the right-hand side, the likes of Sonic, Witcher, Resident Evil, these were iconic gaming IPs that made its way into a movie adaptation or a TV series adaptation as well. When you look at the game that we published last year, which is Stalker 2, we've configured a nice merchandise line that sold quite well.
Then we had a film adaptation on Stalker, and this becomes a good feedback loop. As you have further transmedia opportunities, the IP gets a larger audience. In terms of a transmedia play, I think this is where the entertainment industry is converging into. We are similarly building a nice portfolio of studios. Think of this as the Avenger for GCL, right? The Avenger team. We have Netcom, which is really good in storyline building. We have Leap Studios, which is good in the roguelike game category. Wu-Tang, which is The Defiant, very good in environment-level building, FPS gameplay. You have Sword Panda, which is an action RPG game with good fighting dynamics, which lead into our own IP. Four Divinity is our in-house game development unit.
We're really strong in creating an open-world format, but taking into consideration what each of these studios can bring to the table, that's how we can build out future AAA titles in a very efficient manner as well. We're building our own Avengers team here within GCL for the game developers that we've invested in. With the acquisition, I would say that GCL's business model today is quite simple. It's just broken down into two main pillars. On the left-hand side, you have the stable part of the business, where it's largely distribution of games, both physically and digitally, and consumer electronics and hardware. On the right-hand side, you have the IP play, the outperformance, the developing of the IP, the publishing of IP that we've invested in. It's a very simple business model, but it works.
I think in terms of the positioning for GCL today, I think we're well positioned because over the last 24 months, we've seen the rise of Asian gaming IP. In the history of GCL today, we have been working with some of the biggest studios of the Western markets. We've been involved with Take-Two Interactive, CD Projekt, Mundfish, Warner Bros. At the same time, being based in Asia, we get to have the chance of getting strong Asian IP and bringing them into international markets. As such, think of GCL as the perfect gateway between Eastern markets and Western markets alike. I'll cap it off with the last slide. It shows that in terms of financial growth, we've got a very strong year-on-year growth from FY2024 to 2025.
When you look at the pro forma numbers, you know that our current financial year is going to be stronger than ever as well. Last but not least, over the next 12 months, you have strong growth pillars, including the launch of Nintendo Switch 2, and some of our AAA content has been launched even for Nintendo Switch 2 as well. This is the last slide. I hope this has made you guys a bigger gamer than before. I'll take a pause here to open the floor for any questions that you may have as well.