Earnings: Verisign's Q2: Jamster Stabilizing; M-Qube Generates $12 M For Q2

Verisign has posted its Q2 earnings for 2006, and done the analyst call, and in terms of its mobile content business the word "stabilized" was used a few dozen times, particularly in relation to Jamba/Jamster, which saw $74 million in revenue (down from $77 million last quarter). Dana Evan, CFO of VeriSign, said the stablization was happening earlier than previously forecast.

Verisign's Q2 Revenue 2006 was $392 million, of which $206 million was from the VeriSign Communications Services (VCS) Group, which provides intelligent communications, commerce and content services to telecommunications carriers and next generation service providers.
Within VCS the Communications and Commerce group pulled in $120 million, $86 million from content, including $74 million from Jamba/Jamster. Its recent acquisition M-Qube contributed about $6 $12 million (thanks Steve). VSC ended the quarter with a base of approximately 8.9 million wireless billing customer subscribers, which is around 24% more than the previous year.
For Q3, VRSN expects mobile content-related revenues in the low $90 million range, with Jamba/Jamster contributing about $70 million to that number (rest is presumably from M-Qube).
In question time Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos declined to take credit for the stablization of Jamba/Jamster. "Let's say the same as we saw years ago with domain names, the flood and the false demand is out of the market and now what we see is real demand," said Sclavos. "We've hit stabilization by hitting the bottom of real demand...growth will come by step-by-step improvements across the platform."
He also said that Verisign would continue to run the D2C side of the business in "the high teens of margins", and that it would make the trade off with marketing. "To the extent that we see things in China or Europe take off we'll invest more dollars", if it doesn't do so well Verisign would not be investing a large amount of money to kickstart it -- so those countries will be spared their version of the Crazy Frog.
On country-wise uptake on Jamba/Jamster (from transcript): U.K. has pretty much become irrelevant as it relates to revenue contribution because of the steep decline there...Germany has continued to slow, although it's still shrinking a little bit, although it remains the biggest market and we did see some months of growth and some months of decline there in the quarter. We did see a substantial uptick in China during the quarter and took some of our first revenues from that marketplace and we're interested in seeing that continue. The U.S. also declined but in recent weeks we've actually seen it start to grow again.

(c) MocoNews

Несколько слов от меня:
То, что выручка Jamster'а падает - не удивительно, ибо методы, которыми они добивались текущих цифр продаж таковы, что неизбежно должны были вызвать последующий откат. Скажу больше - такими действиями они могли и убить рынок мобильного контента вообще.
Скорее следует удивляться тому, что они хотя бы удержали продажи на прежнем уровне.