Angry Birds on Facebook Aides in Company's Growth
The widely popular game Angry Birds is at the top of downloadable gaming and has propelled the company behind it to sales of more than $100 million last year, prompting the creator's company to consider going public.
Rovio, the Finnish startup, posted $106.3 million in revenues last year, and- with more than a 60 percent profit margin- was able to post solid profits of $67.6 million.
The tech company was founded in 2003, but only in recent years has it become a global gaming power. With the release of Angry Birds for Apple's iPhone in late 2009, the company quickly was on top, with millions of users downloading the game every day.
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Since then it has remained at top of the gaming charts with more than 800 million downloads and 648 million downloads in 2011 alone. It also currently had over 200 million active monthly users at the end of last year, coming in second behind U.S. gaming company Zynga's 240 million active monthly users.
They were also able to grow personnel as well starting the beginning of last year with 28 employees, but ending with 224.
"Rovio has fended off all rivals so far… Rovio is still the king of the mountain, despite stiff recent challenges by OMGPOP and Disney's 'Where's My Water,'" according to Tero Kuittinen, from the Finnish mobile firm Alekstra.
Rovio plans to launch several more titles in 2012, which include a non-Angry Birds title and also a motion picture, Chief Executive Mikael Hed told Reuters.
"2012 looks fantastic … We have had some very strong download numbers over four months," Hed said.
Rovio is projecting growth to continue in conjunction with the rapidly expanding smartphone market and is making large contributions to product development, branding, brand protection and corporate infrastructure.
The Angry Birds Space game was downloaded more than 50 million times in the first month since its debut in March of this year.
