By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Zynga stock (NASDAQ:ZNGA) climbed nearly 7% in Tuesday’s premarket trading as booming demand for mobile gaming led the Farmville creator to raise its annual guidance.
Third-quarter net bookings rose 6% to $668 million in the third quarter and that handed it its best-ever annual topline performance and the largest mobile audience in its history. Revenue jumped more than 40% to $705 million as the gaming ecosystem continued to thrive on the pandemic-driven demand, with ample support from developers and high-speed networks and devices.
‘FarmVille 3’, launched last week, is off to a great start, the company said. ‘Star Wars: Hunters’, its first cross-platform play franchise, will have a soft launch next week. The company is also working on its next-generation mobile advertising platform to expand its market and gain strength in the digital advertising sector. All that allowed it to raise its annual guidance to $2.78 billion in revenue from the $2.72-billion forecast given earlier.
Despite all that, the company said it posted a loss in the third quarter after spending heavily on R&D.
In other news boosting the stock, Zynga hired founder of emerging media agency D20 Matt Wolf as vice president of Blockchain gaming. He will focus on integrating non-fungible tokens and blockchain technology into Zynga’s existing portfolio.
It also announced a tie-up with TikTok under which it will offer music and dance challenge game Disco (OTC:DSCSY) Loco 3D on the short-form video platform.