OnMobile gearing for a change in its fortunes

Bengaluru: Mobile gaming and entertainment company OnMobile Global is hoping to emerge from the shadows of the past few tepid quarters and see its revenue growth gain some momentum, managing director and Global chief executive officer Sanjay Baweja told DH in an interview.

“Starting from H2 onwards, we expect to observe growth in revenue and profitability. After a few years of relatively stagnant growth, we are now poised for an upward trajectory in both profitability and revenue,” he said.

The Bengaluru-based firm, which had earlier focused on selling services to telecommunications operators, experienced struggling financials in the past few years due to the consolidation of the market.

“In the past 5-6 years, the company experienced a decrease in revenue, but it has worked on addressing these challenges and is now showing improved profitability and we anticipate a change in revenue growth this year,” Baweja said.

In the past two years, OnMobile has shifted its focus to mobile gaming, which includes a fantasy sports and hypercasual games application called ‘Challenges Arena’, which has experienced a 22-fold increase in the last nine quarters and a two-fold increase year-over-year, as per Baweja.

Its other offerings include ‘ONMO’, a pure-play 5G mobile cloud gaming solution, which is now live with 15 operators and has confirmations from approximately 35 operators, and has been showing strong revenue growth over the past 2-3 quarters, the executive said.

“As Challenges Arena and ONMO continue to grow and constitute a larger portion of our portfolio, our overall profitability will also increase. We anticipate that our mobile entertainment products will remain stable with slow growth, but the rapid expansion of Challenges Arena and ONMO will contribute to an overall increase in profitability,” he added.

While the company is present in over 50 countries, a significant portion of its revenue still comes from its domestic market in India. Nevertheless, it has plans for expansion in more overseas markets, especially in Latin America and Europe, the latter of which is smaller in terms of volume but generates more substantial revenue per customer, Baweja said. “Our focus is on increasing the average revenue per customer per month, and with our expansion into Europe, we expect this average to continue growing,” he added.

OnMobile also expects monthly active users to double by the end of the year through new customer partnership and international expansion.

“While our gross subscribers are significantly higher, our monthly active users are around four million plus, and we expect this number to grow. Our goal is to surpass 7-8 million active users by the end of this year,” Baweja said.