Zynga revealed its first-half financial results

After posting disappointing first half results, Zynga Incorporated has revealed that it is poised to enter the real-money online gambling market in the first half of 2013. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus told investors, “We have our first products in development and we intend to release them in markets that are regulated and open subject to our getting licensing. The US is obviously an attractive market, but it’s not open, regulated market.”

Revenues from online games for the second quarter came in at us$ 291.5 million, which was an increase of 10 % compared with the same period last year, while advertising grew 170 percent year-on-year to generate us$ 40.9 million.

Zynga reported a 10 % increase in bookings for the second quarter of the year when compared with the same period in 2011 to us$ 302 million while the first-half figure grew twelve percent year-on-year to us$ 631 million.

Zynga stated that capital expenditures for 2012 as a whole ‘are projected to be in the range’ of us$ 370 million to us$ 380 million with this figure inclusive of the purchase of its corporate facilities.

For the first-half, Zynga announced a 25 % improvement in revenues when compared with the initial six months of 2011 to us$ 653 million.

“Our advertising business continued to show strong growth with revenues up 170 percent year-on-year. Our games reached record audiences, achieving over 300 million monthly active users. We grew our mobile footprint five-fold in the year to 33 million daily active users making Zynga the largest mobile gaming network.' said Mark Pincus, Chief Executive Officer for Zynga.

“We also faced new short-term challenges that led to a sequential decline in bookings. Despite this, we're optimistic about the long-term growth prospects on mobile where we have a window of opportunity to drive the same kind of social gaming revolution that we enabled on the web.”

For the full-year, Zynga admitted that it had lowered its outlook to ‘reflect delays in launching new games, a faster decline in existing web games due in part to a more challenging environment on the Facebook web platform and reduced expectations for Draw Something’. As a result, the firm stated that it expects bookings to be in the range of us$ 1.15 billion to us$ 1.225 billion with adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $180 million to us$ 250 million.