I-Play profitability is sustainable - Eyre

The operating profit recently reported by mobile publisher I-Play is entirely sustainable, according to the firm's chairman Richard Eyre, who told MobileIndustry.biz this afternoon that he believes that the firm's product portfolio now "matches the market".

Eyre was speaking to us about the appointment of I-Play's COO David Gosen as the company's new Chief Executive Officer today, with the former Nintendo Europe boss taking the reins after around a year and a half at the firm.

"The first thing he's achieved is to reach a state of operational profitability, which is a great moment for the company," Eyre said of Gosen. "This sector has been around for a while, and when I first joined the board - probably four years ago now - it was as if we were farmers, sowing fields in lots of different fields, because nobody quite knew what fields were going to work and which seeds were going to grow. Then a couple of years ago, we focused intently on Java and dropped off some of the other things that we had running."

"So it's been a very interesting process, getting to this point, first to break-even and and actually now earning some money. That's a milestone for the company. I think David's task now is to build on that, and the tantalising strategic challenge now is how to build on and grow the profits of the company, whilst at the same time engaging fully in a market which is growing as fast as this is - and as unpredictably as it is, as well. We're asking him to keep earning the money, but also to keep placing the chips wisely. It's a tough brief - I don't think anybody, including David, would regard this as being a cinch."

However, Eyre was positive about the company's prospects for maintaining the profitability which it has now attained - telling us that the market was now in a state which could support profitable publishers.

"When I talk about this business of planting in lots of different fields, obviously that's a fairly expensive way of running a company," he explained, "just learning about where the market is, and so on. Of course, through nothing that we or anybody else have done, the market has caught up very fast - the kind of handsets where it's worth playing a mobile game are growing in penetration very quickly."

"I think that what has happened is that we've learned all we need to about the market; we have tailored our product portfolio so that it now matches the market rather than being ahead of the market. For those reasons, I think that we are confident that we are now in a profitable state - and the pace of revenue growth would suggest that that is sustainable."

Speaking directly about Gosen's elevation to the role of CEO, Eyre praised the former Nintendo and Sky executive's experience and track record, but admitted that the speed of his promotion from COO to CEO had been unexpected.

"It was foreseen, when David was appointed, that it would be useful to have a succession plan," Eyre told us. "So we brought in a guy that had considerable experience of operations and games, and also actually of broader media companies, since he has a background at Sky as well."

"We were anticipating that there would be some kind of coming together of those things in the not-too-distant future - I don't think anything quite like as quickly as it has happened, though!"