[Chrono]

Impressive revenue and great profit margin! Hopefully they will be able to keep this up for 2012. It is worth noting the jump in employees (28 to 224) - I kinda wonder if they will be able to manage them all, with such a sharp increase.

Comparing to Mojang (Minecraft) Rivio have done very well, both having a huge jump in revenue from one year to the next:

$78.8m in Revenue for Mojang and $9.5m in profit before taxes. Quite the magnitude of difference in terms of profit rate, 12.07% for Mojang vs 64% Rovio.

Licensing seems to be profitable?

Source for Mojang financials: http://www.allabolag.se/5568192388/Mojang_AB

(Don't you just love that annual reports for all companies are public information in Sweden?)

[Luc]

To me, Mojang's margins just don't pass the sniff test. It seems they should be much higher. I assume they have done whatever accounting tricks possible to reduce their profit (I'm not suggesting anything untoward, mind).

[Chrono]

I agree, the margins are just too low. They are expanding and such things cost money but they are still only something like 13-15 employees at the moment but still have bad margins.

I would expect at least double the margin for a company with low distribution costs and reasonably low development costs - compared to other studios anyway.

[talmand]

As I'm not aware of the differences between Swedish and US ideas of companies, what is the concept of a privately held company versus a publicly traded company in Sweden? If the comparison holds, are the annual reports of privately held companies public information in Sweden as well?

[Chrono]

Mojang is privately held but they submit an annual report to the tax authority and once OK'ed by them in the public domain so it can be requested from the authority. There are several companies that log all registered companies and their annual reports and publish them (For a fee to get a pdf of the report) online so it is not directly public per say.

It is also worth noting that privately held companies don't have as extravagant annual reports as the publicly traded ones, just plain boring reports but the essential information is the same.

Personally I like the system for it satisfies my curiosity and I don't see any reason why a company should be able to hide their broader financials - I want the ability to check their solvency before using their services for example.

Anyone could access, at least part, of my personal tax records as well as my grades from High school (and Uni I believe). All in all it is very hard to be anonymous in Sweden if someone bothers to look around.

[talmand]

Now that you say all that, I seem to recall that level of openness being mentioned in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.