I’ll say it again: if there is one mobile game out there right now that people in Japan will remember in 10 years, it’s Puzzle & Dragons.
The game, which boasts 13 million registered users in this country (10% of the population), has generated US$113 million in sales in April.
Since late last year, maker GungHo’s market cap at the Osaka Stock Exchange kept rising and rising until – at about US$10 billion- making the company worth more than Mobage operator DeNA, GREE, and Zynga combined.
And today, GungHo shares (ticker: 3765) jumped limit-up by 300,000 yen to 1,342,000 yen (+28.8%) in just a few minutes of trading, until the stock was bid-only.
As a consequence, the company’s market cap now reached 1.54 trillion yen, which translates to US$15.1 billion. With this number, GungHo topped the market cap of US$1.53 trillion yen (or US$15.0 billion) Nintendo (7974) holds.
The US$15.1 billion market cap is also higher than that of Nikon, Fujitsu, Isuzu, Sanyo, All Nippon Airways, Sharp, or Mitsubishi Motors.
It’s a new world we live in.
Other market caps (Monday, May 13 at 11:30am JST):
- GREE: US$2.8 billion
- DeNA: US$3.6 billion
- Zynga at US$2.6 billion
- Electronic Arts: US$6.7 billion
- Activision Blizzard: US$16.7 billion
GungHo’s new owner SoftBank can be very happy.
