NHN said on Monday that its second-quarter revenue on a consolidated basis rose 25.3 percent from a year earlier to 757.9 billion won, while operating profit rose 164.1 percent to 57.9 billion won. Both revenue and operating profit were record quarterly highs.

By segment, second-quarter games revenue rose 21.5 percent from a year earlier and 9.3 percent from the previous quarter to 139.6 billion won. Web board games revenue rose 15 percent year on year, while mobile game revenue in Japan increased 47 percent, helped by collaboration effects for "#COMPASS" and "Chainsaw Man".

The payments segment posted revenue of 394.0 billion won, up 27.3 percent from a year earlier and 11.1 percent from the previous quarter. The company said revenue rose as transaction volume increased 34 percent year on year due to new large merchants coming in to its unit NHN KCP.

The technology segment posted revenue of 159.8 billion won, up 52.9 percent from a year earlier and 27.1 percent from the previous quarter, driven by expansion of its artificial intelligence (AI) graphics processing unit (GPU) business. NHN Cloud saw revenue rise 85.3 percent year on year as it began supplying Nvidia B200-based GPU-as-a-service at its Seoul Yangpyeong region. Japan unit NHN Techorus also posted a 27.0 percent revenue increase on growth in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) resale business. Other revenue fell 8.8 percent from a year earlier to 88.0 billion won.

NHN plans to continue growth in its main businesses in the second half. In games, it plans to launch a new title, "Puchipoyong of the Fantasy World", this winter, which it is developing in collaboration with NHN PlayArt in Japan. It also plans to take part in the Tokyo Game Show in September to present the new title and live games.

In payments, it plans to advance a stablecoin-based payments model. NHN KCP said it completed a demonstration of digital wallet payments and settlement within the Payco application based on a mainnet it jointly developed with blockchain company Avalanche in July.

NHN Cloud, which runs the technology business, plans to secure additional AI data centres of at least 30 megawatts (MW) by next year to meet growing GPU demand. It also plans to expand its existing regions with the latest GPU assets of B300 or higher.

NHN Chief Executive Jeong Woo-jin (정우진) said, "This is the first quarter in which the results of management efficiency and cost controls carried out over the past few years have been confirmed in profits." He said, "We will take this as the starting point of a growth phase and continue this trend in the second half."