(LEAD) Game maker NCsoft Q1 net soars on new title

(ATTN: ADDS share price in last para)

SEOUL, May 12 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's leading game publisher NCsoft Corp. said Tuesday its first-quarter earnings rose more than doubled thanks to strong sales of a new mobile game.

Consolidated net income stood at 195.4 billion won (US$159 million) in the January-March period, up 162 percent from a year earlier, the company said in a regulatory filing.

Sales rose 104 percent on-year to a quarterly high of 731.1 billion won, and operating income shot up 204 percent to 241.4 billion won.

NCsoft said the first-quarter sales growth was driven by Lineage 2M, a new mobile massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) launched in November last year.

The revenue of Lineage 2M amounted to 341.1 billion won in the three-month period, well above sales of 212 billion won posted by its predecessor Lineage M published in June 2017.

Lineage 2M integrates NCsoft's technology and expertise built over the past 20 years and features full 3-D graphics.

Sales in South Korea accounted for the bulk of the total with 634.6 billion won. North America and Europe followed with 19 billion won, Japan with 12.9 billion won and Taiwan with 11.8 billion won, according to the filing.

Shares in NCsoft surged 6.87 percent to close at 747,000 won on the Seoul bourse, far outperforming the broader KOSPI's 0.68 percent fall. The first-quarter results were unveiled before the market closed.
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