NetEase revenue beats as online gaming businesses continue to grow
NetEase beat market expectation for 2021 revenue as the company’s online gaming and music steaming reported robust performance.
The company booked a year-over-year increase of 19% for its net revenue of CNY87.6 billion in 2021.
Profit rose 21.6% to $7.3 billion for the year of 2021, compared to 2020’s $6 billion.
Online-gaming revenue, which is the largest revenue generator, accounted for 71.6% of the company’s total revenue in 2021, reported a 15% year-on-year growth to CNY62.8 billion in 2021. The growth in the online-gaming sector was primarily driven by titles such as Naraka: Bladepoint and Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, NetEase noted.
The result is still preliminary as it still need to be reviewed by audit.
“Thanks to strong performances in our online game services as well as other business segments, our online game services net revenues continued to grow, propelled by the sustained and growing popularity of our existing titles. At the third quarter of the year, we launched the long-anticipated Naraka: Bladepoint, which gave us a wonderful start to the first quarter of 2022. We will continue to release new titles to both domestic and global players in 2022.” NetEase CEO Ding Lei said.
Developed by NetEase’s 24 Entertainment studio and published by NetEase Games Montreal, Naraka: Bladepoint is a multiplayer action game in the battle royale format, widely used in many trendy games such as PlayerUnknown’s battleground. It features a movement system that allows players to climb, hang, and even parkour on buildings of the mysterious Eastern realm of Morus.
Released on August 12, Naraka: Bladepoint ranked the top on Steam’s weekly list of top ten sellers for the second week of August. In August, the game pulled in an average player count of 53,529, peaking at 119,022 concurrent players, according to Steam Charts.
According to the financial report, Netease is accelerating the progress of e-sports championship for Naraka: Bladepoint.
Cloud Village, NetEase’s music unit that went public on Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2021, has saw revenue surging by 42% year-on-year to CNY7 billion.
Cloud Village is one of beneficiaries of Chinese authorities’ investigation into Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) over its exclusive deals signed with the world’s biggest music labels, which has resulted in TME ending exclusive licensing agreements with labels such as Sony Music, Universal Music.
The online education business Youdao, which had been spun off by NetEase and went public separately on NYSE in October 2020, has achieve quarterly profit for the first time, generating a revenue of CNY1.3 billion in the fourth quarter and CNY5.4 billion for the full 2021.