AppMarket One Store (CEO Lee Jae-hwan), which provides various mobile contents such as games, apps, and story contents, announced on the 25th that it has renewed its highest performance for 14 consecutive quarters and surpassed KRW 1 trillion in annual transaction volume in 2021.
One Store recorded 1.13 trillion won in transaction value last year, a 28% increase from the previous year’s 884.5 billion won. It is growing at a rapid pace, with the transaction amount more than doubling in three years since 2018, when a fee reduction policy for coexistence with the industry was first implemented.
Sales reached KRW 214.2 billion, surpassing KRW 200 billion within six years of establishment, recording a 38% increase compared to KRW 155.2 billion in the previous year. In addition, EBITDA (operating profit before tax, interest, and depreciation) was KRW 8 billion, recording a profit for the third consecutive year.
Since the enforcement of the fee policy, OneStore has grown into a company that has recorded double-digit or more sales growth every year, representing Korea and the only company in the world that effectively competes with the global app market.
Its influence in the market is also growing gradually. According to the ‘Mobile Index’ released by big data platform company IG Works by estimating the transaction amount of the three app market companies, OneStore took up about 13.8% of the domestic app market as of last year, beating the global app market and ranked second. solidified the position of It has established itself as a ‘game changer’ in the app market industry that has broken the monopoly structure and as a market adjuster against the monopoly of global companies.
In 2021, One Store achieved good results in all fields, including games, apps, story content, and shopping. In addition, since announcing the corporate vision of a ‘global multi-OS content platform’ in August last year, it has been accelerating its preparations for overseas market expansion and business expansion by sector.
In 2021, the main business of One Store, the game sector, sales increased by 31.3% compared to 2020. During the year, Devsisters’ ‘Cookie Run: Kingdom’, Nexon’s ‘Blue Archive’, and Kuga Games’ ‘Three Kingdoms Strategy Edition’ achieved outstanding results in the One Store.
Recently, ‘ONE GameLoop’, a cross-platform service of One Store, recorded a cumulative payment of 12.8 billion won in about six months after the beta service was launched, leading the cross-platform service market. Also, future growth is expected, such as signing a strategic partnership with Blizzard Entertainment to attract extra-large game titles at the end of last year and starting pre-orders for ‘Diablo® Immortal™’.
The story and shopping divisions also grew rapidly. Last year, One Store’s non-game sales increased by 55.7% compared to the previous year. In particular, in 2021, we focused on strengthening our capabilities in the field of story content. One Store is expanding its business throughout the story content value chain, from content creation to distribution and beyond, to One Source Multi Use (OSMU).
To this end, it took over the genre novel publisher Lock Media, invested in China’s No. 1 webtoon platform ‘Kwai Khan’, and established YES24 and ‘Studio Yes One’. In addition, the ‘Web Novel Contest’ is held to provide new writers with a letter of recommendation, and the award-winning content is being made into a webtoon, thereby actively securing source IP. In addition, the existing ‘One Store Books’ is newly introduced as ‘One Story’ and the contents business is expanding in earnest by further strengthening customer service.
In the shopping field, it opened specialized stores such as ‘Nintendo’, ‘Logitech’, ‘Playstation’, and ‘Corsair’ to strengthen the competitiveness of gaming gear specialized shopping channels. One Store was loved by gamers by providing various benefits such as discount coupons and free gifts along with the latest devices, and recording early sales of all products in several special exhibitions.
In the app sector, rich benefits were promoted for the apps in the store. Events for customers in various app fields, such as paying points when downloading or paying for apps such as ‘wave’, ‘FLO’, and ‘Afreeca TV’, and paying points when checking car insurance premiums at ‘Samsung Fire & Marine’ carried out
Jaehwan Lee, CEO of OneStore, said, “OneStore is growing into a game changer that changes the market in the face of monopoly in the global app market by coexisting with developers. As One Store is attracting attention, this year, we will focus our capabilities on global market challenges.”