Increased Profit, Strong Cashflow, Yet Another Record Quarter for Angry Birds 2
Comments from CEO, Kati Levoranta:
Rovio’s operating profit in the third quarter of 2018 grew to EUR 10.4 million from EUR 1.6 million of the third quarter in 2017 and the company operating cashflow was over EUR 11 million. The revenue in the quarter was on the same level as the year before, growing 0.5% to EUR 71.0 million from the last year’s EUR 70.7 million.
The costs of acquiring new users were somewhat higher than in the previous quarter. In order to keep the payback time of these investments within the targeted 8-12 months range, the company invested less in user acquisition this quarter which also contributed to a better operating profit.
Angry Birds 2 gross bookings grew for the third quarter in a row and 68% year-on-year, while Angry Birds Friends proved itself a reliable wingman with a steady performance. Angry Birds 2 has kept its position in the top grossing charts thus, providing a good base for next year’s 10th year anniversary of Angry Birds and The Angry Birds Movie sequel. To ensure faster innovation cycle in Angry Birds 2, a third development team was added during the year.
While we reiterate the importance of continuously improving our live games with the goal of increasing their revenue over time, it is clear that we need new games in order to accelerate growth. Consequently, we are increasing the number of new internal and external game projects for the next and following years. We have 12 game projects ongoing in different phases and next year, our goal is to launch at least two new games. We have now two Angry Birds games in soft launch and, in addition, one game is waiting for publishing decision for the Chinese market.
In August, as a part of Rovio’s exploration in the future of gaming, we saw the launch of Angry Birds Mixed Reality (MR) game Angry Birds: FPS (First Person Slingshot) on the Magic Leap MR platform. Moreover, Rovio’s 80% owned cloud-based game streaming service Hatch has left beta phase and was recently publicly released on Google Play in the Nordic countries, UK and Ireland.
On November 14th Rovio announced that Alexandre Pelletier-Normand has been appointed as the Executive Vice President of Rovio’s Games Business Unit and a member of Rovio’s Leadership Team. Alexandre is a seasoned games executive with a remarkable career in the industry. He is joining Rovio from Gameloft and starting on January 2, 2019.
Read the full report here