HONG KONG, March 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Newborn Town Inc. (9911. HK) announced its 2022 annual results. In 2022, Newborn Town recorded a revenue of RMB 2,800 million, representing a year-on-year ("YoY") increase of 18.6%. Social networking and innovative business revenue reached RMB 2,557 million and RMB 242 million, respectively. Profit for 2022 increased by 174.2% YoY to RMB 287 million, and profit attributable to the owners of company increased by 145.5% YoY to RMB 130 million.

According to the announcement, Newborn Town has witnessed steady growth in its social networking business throughout 2022. The average MAUs of its social apps increased 20.0% year-on-year to 22.91 million. As of December 31, 2022, Newborn Town has achieved over 480 million cumulative downloads of social apps.

In addition to consolidating its core social business, Newborn Town continued exploring the synergies between gaming and social networking segments. The latest data shows that TopTop, the game-oriented social product, has ranked top 3 highest-grossing social apps in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries since its launch. Besides, the average daily time spent by active users reached 60 minutes, and its revenue for Q4 2022 increased by over 30% quarter-on-quarter.

Newborn Town also strived to enrich its social app portfolio by exploring new opportunities in the LGBTQ market. In early 2022, Newborn Town was involved in the privatization of BlueCity through its investment fund, and BlueCity was delisted from Nasdaq after the deal was finished in August.

According to the latest announcement released on March 23, 2023, Newborn Town has signed the Sale and Purchase agreement to acquire the entire issued share capital of Chizicheng Strategy Investment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Spriver. Upon completion of the acquisition, Newborn Town will consolidate the financials of BlueCity into the Group's financial statements.

As known from the public information, BlueCity was a leading social-networking company in the LGBTQ field which launched the global social app Blued. It's also noteworthy that Newborn Town aims to expand its presence in the overseas market through a combination of seasoned experience in globalization and capabilities of localized operations. And this privatization undoubtedly enabled Newborn Town to make a foray into a market with growth potential.

The annual result also indicated Newborn Town's progress in the niche games business. In 2022, Newborn Town officially launched the "Mergeland" series, the niche self-developed synthetic mobile games which Google Play App Stores have highly recommended from over 150 countries.

It is reported that Newborn Town, following the steady growth of existing products, looks to continuously develop more niche and casual games, including the synthesis and simulation types, in order to cultivate the second growth curve of the company.