It's not in the Japanese psyche to big up your successes, but when it comes to social mobile gaming platform vendor GREE, its performance is certainly worth crowing about.

During the past four months, it's increased its 2012 financial year performance not once, but twice.

It now expects FY12 net sales of around $2.2 billion and net income over $650 million.

This is up 70 percent in terms of sales, and 100 percent in terms of income from its guidance in October 2011.

Big, getting bigger

"It's a conservative estimate. There's still potential upside," says Naoki Aoyagi, and he should know.

As well as being CEO of GREE International (the company's US subsidiary), he's also GREE's chief financial officer.

The other significant thing about these numbers is that they're still being generated by its core Japanese business, which consists of 28.9 million mainly feature phone subscribers.

Despite GREE's aggressive push onto smartphones and into the rest of Asia, as well as Europe and North America - something underlined by its $104 million acquisition of US mobile platform OpenFeint in April 2011 - this part of the business (160 million users strong) remains commercially nascent.

"99 percent of revenue is currently from Japan," Aoyagi explains.

"But we expect more than 50 percent of sales to be generated from the US and the rest of the world."

When asked over what timeframe, he's bullish. "This isn't in the longterm. It's not over the next five to ten years. It's the next 1-2-3 years."

Big bang launch

The reason for this prediction is the Q2 2012 launch of GREE's new global social mobile gaming network that will combine the existing Japanese and global OpenFeint users into a seamless single-sign on system for iOS and Android.

In this way, GREE hopes to bring high spending behaviour from Japan into the wider world, seeding the platform launch with 12 first party games and 12 from partners.

The importance of the launch is also underlined by the $50 million the company will spend in terms of marketing.

Aoyagi is clear that GREE is more of a platform play than a game developer, however; something that differs to the approach taken by its Japanese rival DeNA, which is focusing more heavily on making its own content.

"What's important for us is the ecosystem," says Aoyagi.

"We expect more than 90 percent of the games on the platform to come from third party publishers and developers."

Android powers ahead

And, on the back of the launch, while GREE is already a company whose financial scale puts it somewhere inbetween Zynga and Facebook, its plans are even more ambitious.

"We're currently adding more than 10 million users a month, but our goal is 1 billion users globally. Scale is very important." Aoyagi says.

"One billion is achievable on smartphones."

To hit this number, it will have to support both iOS and Android. But, of the two, it's Google's platform that GREE will look to.

"iOS has a huge user base, but we're betting on Android. It has huge potential and is strategically important to us," he explains.

"In Asia, Android's market share is larger than iOS while ARPUs and revenues are roughly same, at least that's what we're seeing in Japan."