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Social casino growth sees Zynga post $3 million profit in FY15 Q3

Beats guidance

Social casino growth sees Zynga post $3 million profit in FY15 Q3

US game publisher Zynga (NASDAQ:ZNGA) has announced its FY15 Q3 financials, for the 3 months ending 30 September 2015.

Revenue was $196 million, down 2% quarter-on-quarter, but up 11% year-on-year.

Net income was $3 million.

Zynga made a loss of $27 million three months ago, and a loss of $57 million 12 months ago.

The company ended the quarter with cash and equivalents of $1.1 billion.

It also announced a $200 million share buyback that could last through to October 2017.

Better operations

"Our teams delivered a strong Q3 driven by the performance by Wizard of Oz Slots, Words With Friends and our newly launched Empires & Allies," said CEO Mark Pincus.

Around 69% of Zynga's booking are now generated from mobile games, up from 26% a year ago.

Zynga's mobile revenue is growing

Pincus was also keen to talk up how Zynga was improving its monetisation.

"In Q3, we saw average bookings per user (ABPU) grow 27% year-over-year and 10% sequentially," he said.

The company is also pushing heavily into advertising, growing that revenue was up 39% year-over-year and 17% sequentially to $45 million.

Audience slide

During the quarter, Zynga's average DAUs, dropped 10% compared to Q2 to 19 million.

However, mobile DAUs were only down 6%.

MAUs and DAUs continue to fall

MAUs were also down 10% to 75 million, while mobile MAUs were down 5% to 61 million.

Indeed, Zynga's audience has been on the slide for the past year

Payer conversion rate was 1.7% compared to 1.6% in Q2, although this improvement was likely due to the average monthly payer total dropping from 1 million to 900,000.

[source: Zynga]

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.