Owen Mahoney is out at Nexon – and Junghun Lee is in. That’s the key bit of news coming out of the company’s Q3 financial report today, as Nexon’s board announced its “succession plan” and unanimously nominated Lee, who was already on the board and serving as subsidiary Nexon Korea’s CEO, to take over from Mahoney as Nexon Co.’s president and CEO. Shareholders will vote on the succession next March, at which point Mahoney, who’s been with Nexon in an executive role since 2010 will remain on the board as “senior advisor.”
And Mahoney is going out on top: Unlike many other gaming corporations right now, Nexon turned in its sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year revenue growth, with the expectation that the run will only continue. According to the company, those figures were driven heavily by huge boosts on PC, which were up 40% year-over-year thanks to MapleStory and FC Online. Like NCsoft, Nexon also reported continuing declines in mobile revenues.
“MapleStory demonstrated once again Nexon’s unprecedented ability to deliver consistent and robust growth from its massive Virtual Worlds. Now in its 20th year, MapleStory grew an incredible 46% yearover-year in Q3. With our Q4 guidance, MapleStory’s annual revenue is now 3 times bigger than it was only 5 years ago. And we think the future of MapleStory Mobile is also bright. During the quarter we launched MapleStory M in China, and it has been performing better than our internal expectations.
Looking ahead for the west specifically, Nexon is banking on MapleStory M and The Finals to entrance our market; in its promotional slide, the company talks up 7.5M downloads already for The Finals during its worldwide open beta test.
