Habbo profitable on $38m of revenue in 2008 H1? September 25, 2008
Posted by jeremyliew in games, games 2.0, gaming, habbo, virtual worlds.trackback
Arctic Startup, quoting an article written in Finnish at Kauppelehti, the leading business magazine in Finland says:
The Helsinki based virtual goods operator Sulake saw a profitable first half in 2008. According to Kauppalehti, net profits were around 400 000 euros. The revenues rose approximately 20% to 25,6 million euros for the first 6 months of 2008. Majority of the sales came from sale of virtual goods in Habbo Hotels world wide. According to the company, the annual growth for 2008 will be around 30%.
Jussi Laakkonen also notes from the same source:
Sulake’s 22 M€ [of investment from 3i] is [quoted] from Kauppalehti, the leading Finnish business magazine, which calculated the total losses incurred by Sulake from its founding in year 2000 to end of year 2007 using public records. VC money raised is more than this.
Update: Virtual World News pulls in conflicting revenue reports over time for Habbo.
Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog 
[…] virtual world Habbo may be making up to $38 million in revenue a year? — Jeremy Liew looks at various rumors about how much the company could be […]
i’m confused, is this habbo itself or just the goods seller in finland? implied habbo would be much bigger than that by orders of magnitude?
@ Randy, Sulake is the publisher of Habbo, so this would be Habbo itself
yep — confused it with cyworld. lack of sleep mixing up countries with far more bandwidth than the US (or me!)
Jeremy –
How are other virtual goods and virtual businesses performing in other countries? Would be nice to see a worldwide survey. Up for some collaboration?
Good news but on that sort of revenues I would expect higher profits.
[…] How real is the virtual goods market? Last year, one rough estimate of the worldwide market for real-money trading of virtual goods was around $2 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners’ blog recently estimated that Facebook is currently selling virtual gifts — such as digital hugging teddy bears — at an annualized rate of about $35 million a year. Lightspeed’s blog also reports that Sulake, a Finnish company, is getting the majority of its revenue from selling virtual goods. […]