Game Giant Perfect World to Lay Off Up to 1,000 Employees
Perfect World, a leading publisher of online games, disclosed its record of investor relations activities on Monday, mentioning that the company has streamlined some of its internal teams that pose challenges to its future development. The company previously laid off hundreds of employees in the fourth quarter of 2021.
According to the company’s records, up to now, there are about 4,000 employees in the R&D teams in Perfect World. In the subsequent round of layoffs, the company is expected to cut between several hundred and one thousand employees. After this move, the company’s R&D team will mainly focus on two directions: one is the relatively traditional MMO (massively multiplayer online) and “MMO+” games, and the other is the multiplayer open world games and card games targeting young players.
On the whole, in the first quarter of 2022, the company will continue to carry out mass layoffs. The overall number of personnel is expected to further decrease and the labor costs will be reduced accordingly. Although the company will recruit new employees in some main projects including Tower of Fantasy, the overall personnel cost will drop significantly compared to the fourth quarter of 2021.
Perfect World launched five mobile games in 2021. Among them, the two best-performing games are Fantasy New Jade Dynasty and Tower of Fantasy. The former was launched on June 25, 2021, with a cumulative cashflow of nearly 1.6 billion yuan ($251.51 million) by the end of 2021 and an annual profit of 500-600 million yuan ($78.6 million-$94.32 million), while the latter was launched on December 16, 2021, with over 10 million new users and a turnover of nearly 500 million yuan ($78.6 million) in the first month of 2022. The overseas version of Tower of Fantasy is expected to be launched in 2022.
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Perfect World released its 2021 annual performance forecast on January 21. It is estimated that the net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company will be 350-390 million yuan ($54.99 million-$61.27 million) in 2021, down 77.40%-74.81% year-on-year, mainly consisting of game business, film and television business and headquarters expenditure.
Perfect World expects to achieve a net profit after deducting non-recurring gains and losses of 100 million yuan to 120 million yuan ($15.71 million-$18.85 million) in 2021, down 90.42%-88.50% year-on-year. The net profit of its game business after deducting non-recurring gains and losses is expected to reach 180-200 million yuan ($28.28 million-$31.42 million), and the net profit of its film and television business after deducting non-recurring gains and losses is 70-90 million yuan ($11 million-$14.14 million).
