CyberAgent, Inc. (4751) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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.

This is Fujita. I would like to take you through the first quarter financial results. So our financial year ends in September, so this fiscal year has begun in October and will end in December. Overall, we're doing well. So our sales has 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 & IP and our OP increased by JPY 2.2 billion Y-o-Y. So it's a significant increase. And Advertising business grew by 11.8% -- the sales grew by 11.8% year-on-year and our OP increased by 6.1%. And the Game business, there are some titles that did not perform as well, although we released new games. So it has -- the OP has decreased slightly. Overall, consolidated sales grew by 5.6% year-on-year. So we have done 1/4 of our annual plan. So we are doing well. With the OP, as I mentioned before, we increased the OP by 32.1%. 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. So in the first quarter, we're seeing the similar trends as last fiscal year. And this is the P&L. And there weren't any change -- major changes to the balance sheet either. So against our forecast for this fiscal year, the sales target is JPY 820 billion and OP is JPY 442 billion. And every year, we are trying to increase revenue and profit. 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 & 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. So we -- with respect to ABEMA, it's 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 is nearly 40% of our on-demand viewership. So 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. So 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 & 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 Cygames pictures, and we have already received great feedback. So we launched Cygames pictures in 2016, we're getting great feedback, and we have newly launched CA Soa, an anime production company. We do have a lot of ABEMA users, and we're trying to create and monetize mainly games, the 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, expand steadily. So we have grown by double digits. It is quite a volume already, but it's grown significantly at 11.8%. So 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 the OPM in the future. One of the key initiatives includes the implementation and operation of AI. We have made a lot of upfront investments in this advertising business and AI. So 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. So we decreased OP by -- OP has decreased by 4.1%. As I mentioned before, some titles did well, some titles did not. So the mix has changed. But in FY 2025, we have pushed back some releases, but Chikawa will be released quite soon. And Anime Sakamoto Days is a very big hit right now, but we will be releasing this, 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 '24, we invested our profits from Internet and Game business into the Media business to nurture ABEMA to become one of our key pillar of 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. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]