Netmarble Makes Bold Bet on Social Casino... Acquires 'SpinX' for 2.5 Trillion KRW (Comprehensive)

[Asia Economy Reporter Buaeri] Netmarble has acquired the world's third-largest mobile social casino game company.

On the 2nd, Netmarble announced that it has decided to acquire 100% of the shares of the mobile social casino game company 'SpinX' for $2.19 billion (approximately 2.5 trillion KRW).

This amount is about 800 billion KRW larger than the 1.74 trillion KRW Netmarble spent when acquiring the rental service company 'Coway' in 2019. It is also the largest-scale merger and acquisition (M&A) in the domestic gaming industry.

Netmarble appears to have made a bold investment in the growth potential of social casino games. In particular, it is expected to actively target the North American market. Since acquiring the promising North American developer Kabam in 2016, Netmarble has released numerous games utilizing popular overseas intellectual properties (IP), achieving results in the North American market. As of the first quarter of this year, the sales distribution by region was 36% North America, 29% Korea, 12% Europe, 9% Japan, 9% Southeast Asia, and 5% others.

Social casino refers to games such as slot machines, bingo, and poker that can be played in casinos but have been moved online and to mobile platforms, with the main stage being the North American market. Overseas, these are classified as pure games and are free from government regulation, but in Korea, they are operated with restrictions.

Lee Seung-won, CEO of Netmarble, explained, "The social casino game genre is continuously growing globally, and especially SpinX is the fastest-growing company in this genre."

Founded in 2014, SpinX's representative titles include Cash Frenzy, Latcher Slots, and Jackpot World, and as of the second quarter of 2021, it ranked third in global mobile social casino genre revenue.

SpinX has been the fastest-growing company in the social casino industry in recent years. In 2019, it recorded sales of 497 billion KRW. In the first quarter of this year, it achieved sales of 162.2 billion KRW, and in the first half of the year, sales increased by 46% year-on-year to 328.9 billion KRW.

CEO Lee said, "With this acquisition, Netmarble will diversify its game portfolio by securing the social casino genre in addition to its existing main genre of role-playing games (RPG), and through this, we expect to further strengthen our global game competitiveness."

Paul Jang, CEO of SpinX, stated, "Since the mobile social casino business is a continuously growing field, we will make this an opportunity to further solidify our global competitiveness through synergy with Netmarble."