The following is an overview of the 1st Quarter (January to March) FY12/2021.
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■Financial Overview
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Here you can see an overview of Q1 FY2021 from January 1, 2021, to March 31, 2021.
Quarterly net sales, operating profit, ordinary profit, and net profit achieved a record high. Internet Infrastructure and Finance grew steadily and Online Advertising & Media recovered.
These are each segment’s quarterly net sales and operating profit trends. The sustainable trend growth of the Infrastructure segment and the impressive contribution made by the Cryptoassets segment led to a change in the composition of revenue.
As the Cryptoassets business grew and became the third pillar of business, operating profit reached a record high.
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■Internet Infrastructure
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This is net sales in the Internet Infrastructure segment and its breakdown. The Internet Infrastructure segment has been growing on an ongoing basis since Q2 FY2020 as the online consumption hovers at a high level due to stay-at-home orders and as the segment utilizes the strengths of the No. 1 services.
Operating profit has been growing on an ongoing basis as well and achieved a record high.
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■Online Advertising & Media
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This is net sales in Online Advertising and Media and its breakdown. The net sales of internet advertising and media are up 10.9 percent year on year. Online Advertising and Media can meet strong client demand for advertisements and is on a recovery trend.
Shown here are Online Advertising and Media segment’s profit trends by quarter over the past 6 years. Online Advertising & Media could meet strong demand for advertisements as it focused on the expansion of its customers, so the operating profit increased significantly. Revenue of ad tech products increased and it was profitable. We would continue to put effort into the actual investment to enhance the in-house products and media.
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■Internet Finance
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Revenue and profit dropped YoY due to the volatile market last year (due to COVID-19). Both revenue and profit were up QoQ as the campaign of FX ended. Internet Finance saw steady growth in both FX and CFD.
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■Cryptoassets segment
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This is net sales in the Cryptoassets segment and its breakdown. Both the cryptoassets exchange business and the cryptoassets mining business performed favorably due to the volatile cryptoassets market since late last year, which led to 377% growth in net sales year-on-year, achieving a record high.
Shown here are the Cryptoassets segment’s profit trends by quarter over the past 5 years. GMO Internet has stopped disclosing the operating profit of each subsegment of the Cryptoassets segment this year due to the stable operation of the cryptoassets mining business. Both the cryptoassets exchange business and the cryptoassets mining business have high marginal profit, so the increased revenue has led to 843% growth in operating profit year-on-year, achieving a record high.
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■TOPICS
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■GMO Sign
GMO Internet hereby announces that it has launched a smartphone application. We have given notice that we will provide a smartphone application, and stated that seal impression’s future will be inside smartphones in the results presentation in February. The application has been released on May 12. Seal impression and contract will not be eliminated. GMO Sign, as a safe electronic contract service available to everyone whenever and wherever, will allow seal impressions to be installed on smartphones.
■NFT business
In April, GMO Internet announced that it would enter the NFT business. Right now it is still hard to approach and understand NFT even if you search Non-Fungible Token (NFT) on the Internet.
Think about trading books.
In the case of real books, we buy print editions at real and online bookstores and sell them as second-hand books when they are no longer needed.
From the perspective of content holders, these secondary transactions cannot be tracked, and economic opportunities are limited to the outright sales model of “releasing the new publication.”
In the case of e-books, we purchase digital data, or “right to read,” through marketplaces such as Amazon.
However, this right is only a relationship with the marketplace and cannot be bought or sold by others. Even for content holders, economic opportunities are limited to the outright sales model that accompanies “granting the right to read.”
In the case of NFT, tokens are distributed. Even if it is secondarily distributed by the blockchain, you can follow the movement. Depending on how it is programmed, the copyright holders and publishers will get paid.
With NFT, the Internet, which has been functioning as a distribution network until now, can become potential revenue streams for IP holders. Our view is that all content in the world will be converted to NFT. We believe this is the “digital content distribution revolution.”
NFT has great potential in the future but it is still difficult to actually use it. Right now it is difficult to understand NFT. The marketplace called “Adam” is being developed to make an easy-to-use marketplace that is very easy to understand for everyone by utilizing GMO Internet Group’s technological strengths and existing services.
Simply put, customers can easily buy things with fiat currency or credit cards like Amazon or Rakuten and sell things easily like Mercari. The idea is that everything can be completed on “Adam.” This is exactly like Adam and Eve, and we got this name “Adam” from Genesis. Under the slogan of “Provide dreams and excitement to people worldwide through the smiles of content holders,” we are developing the NFT marketplace “Adam byGMO” (www.adam.jp ). We will announce the details soon, so please look forward to it.
Internet for Everyone
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