Rovio Entertainment published a brief note about its 2015 finances today, acknowledging that they weren’t great and promising to have a better 2016 thanks (in part) to the upcoming Angry Birds feature film.
This is well in line with comments made by Rovio games chief Wilhelm Taht to Gamasutra last month, who admitted that “2014 and 2015 were challenging years” that saw the company forced to cut a lot of jobs and restructure its business because “we expanded very quickly in certain areas that didn’t necessarily turn out to be so profitable.”
Today the company shed some light on exactly how unprofitable by reporting an operating loss of €13 million (roughly $14.8 million USD) for 2015. That’s on top of €142 million (~$162.1 million USD) in revenue for the year, of which roughly 80 percent came from Rovio’s games business.
“As expected, 2015 was a challenging year for Rovio partly due to heavy investments in our future success,” Rovio CEO Kati Levoranta stated in the press release. “However, we have managed to improve our efficiency and turn around the company. This year’s first quarter is already profitable and the outlook for the rest of the year is positive,”
She went on to note that the company has high expectations for the Angry Birds film, which hits theaters next month. Employees working on the film were the only ones exempt from Rovio’s most recent round of layoffs last fall.