Zynga posts $3M profits in Q3, beats expectations
Social online gaming Zynga posts its third-quarter earnings that beat analysts expectations, revealing that the company is still able to compete in current mobile-age time.
Zynga reported $176 million in bookings with a revenue of $196 million.
According to CNBC, analysts expected that the company will report a loss for the third-quarter earnings and will see its revenue decline by 3 percent to $170 million with a loss of 1 cent per share.
However, Zynga managed to even get a $3 million in profit for this quarter turning the company's previous third-quarter loss in 2014 of around $57.1 million.
With users transitioning from computer gaming towards mobile gaming, the company behind the once-popular Farmville is facing a challenge in keeping the company profitable as its users are slowly declining.
However, TechCrunch reported that CEO Mark Pincus is optimistic about the company as Zynga is slowly venturing into a different area including social casino and Words With Friends for its mobile game.
Pincus said in an interview that "there's some other categories in mobile that we have deeper investments in and we've built strong positions in, like the social casino - we're number two in slots - and action strategy with Empires & Allies, which we're just getting back into. And we've made a huge commitment with acquiring Natural Motion. We intend to be a major long term player and provider in action-strategy."
Besides its gaming strategy, Zynga had also done lots of cost cutting at its operational level especially when Mark Pincus took over the company again in April this year from Mattrick.
Pincus had lay off 18 percent of its staff and also stop supporting non-performing games according to VentureBeat.
Among the games that the company had withdrawn from is in sports and endless runner games. The company also re-strategize its users focus as they have learned from the failing of its strategy game; Empires & Allies according to Pincus.
In terms of Zynga shares price, the company is trying their best to make sure its stock price maintain at a good level and the company is planning for a shares repurchase of around $200 million in stock.
According to Pincus, with Zynga $1.1 billion in cash and marketable equities, shares repurchase should be done to make sure the company will have better control.
On a related note, the company's CFO, David Lee is resigning from the company after holding the position for over a year. Zynga did not provide any statement regarding the resignation.