NC Park Byung-moo "Growing Subculture and Shooting... Also Improving Game Evaluation Procedures"

Park Byung-moo, co-CEO of NCSoft, stated on the 26th, "We will continue to grow this field through ongoing new investments and securing rights in subculture and shooting genres."

At the 28th regular shareholders' meeting held at NCSoft's Research and Development (R&D) Center in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, Park made these remarks. He explained, "Other genres are trying to form genre-specific clusters through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). We have expanded talent acquisition both internally and externally for new genres and are additionally in the process of appointing more."

He also revealed plans to improve the internal game evaluation process. Park said, "We have intensely reflected on the reasons why recent new games did not meet expectations," adding, "In the past, NCSoft demonstrated technological innovation with every game release and closely communicated with users to create enjoyable games, but we believe this approach has weakened over the past few years." He continued, "To satisfy both new and returning users, we are further refining the management of intellectual property (IP), and for both self-developed and published games, we have established a company-wide technical evaluation and game evaluation task force (TF) to set high standards and conduct thorough reviews."

He also presented specific plans for performance improvement. He said, "Despite releasing some new titles last year, the results did not meet shareholders' expectations, and as management, we feel a heavy responsibility." He added, "Last year, we carried out extensive fixed cost and organizational efficiency improvements, reducing the number of executives by 20%, and over 800 employees retired, decreasing the headcount at headquarters from about 5,000 to the 3,100 range." He continued, "The promised sale of the Samsung-dong NC Tower is currently underway. However, the proceeds from this sale will be excluded from short-term dividends to be used for the construction costs of the Global Research and Development Innovation (RDI) Center."

NCSoft announced that its consolidated operating loss last year was 109.2 billion KRW, turning to a deficit compared to an operating profit of 137.3 billion KRW the previous year. This marks the first loss since 1998. Revenue decreased by 11.3% year-on-year to 1.5781 trillion KRW, and net profit fell by 56% to 94.1 billion KRW.

Meanwhile, NCSoft finalized a dividend of 1,460 KRW per share. Additionally, four agenda items?the approval of financial statements and consolidated financial statements, the appointment of outside directors, the appointment of audit committee members, and the approval of director remuneration limits?were all passed as originally proposed.