The company plans to spend several hundred million more.
MapleStory is one of the main Nexon blockbusters
The developer and publisher of Asian MMO Nexon has announced major investment spending.
He revealed that at the end of 2020 he completed four investment deals worth $874 million. The following public enterprises received the money:
- Hasbro — market capitalization of $13.53 billion;
- Bandai Namco — market capitalization of $16.4 billion;
- Konami — market capitalization of $8.6 billion;
- Sega Sammy — market capitalization of $4.3 billion.
It is not reported how much each of the companies received. At the same time, Nexon, whose market value is $29.1 billion, noted that it had already earned $279 million from its long-term investments as unrealized income (that is, income that was generated as a result of a change in the valuation of the asset, but was not accompanied by a real cash flow as a result of the sale of the corresponding asset).
Nexon has no plans to buy any of the declared companies entirely or interfere in their management. Moreover, Nexon was not even initially set up to build close partnerships with them. However, this did not prevent them from starting during the investment. But it is noted that negotiations on joint work have only been held with some companies.
In general, Nexon considers investing as an act of trust in current managers and an opportunity to invest the existing cache properly. Currently, $4.8 billion is stored in the publisher’s accounts. Of this amount, another $626 million will be spent on investing in gaming and entertainment in 2021. The fact is that last year the Nexon board of directors approved a total investment of $1.5 billion. Most of it was spent just at the end of 2020.
Nexon says that it invested not only in Hasbro, Bandai Namco, Konami and Sega Sammy. However, I’m not ready to talk about other deals. The reason has an unusual wording: “The amounts invested in them do not correspond to the value set by the company for disclosure of information.” Perhaps we are talking about very small investments.
Nexon is a Korean-Japanese company. 56% of its revenue comes from gaming sales in Korea, where MapleStory, Dungeon& Fighter and FIFA ONLINE 4 are responsible for the main cash register. The company is successful both on the PC market and on mobile. The latter generates only a third of its total revenue. However, the share of mobile is growing rapidly (by 60% per year, according to the financial report for 2020).