I am a former employee of NCsoft.
I am glad to see that the analysts get it finally. I couldn't believe it when the stock went up to 360k KRW based on nothing but pure IR BS, but I have to say they had a really good CFO. I think Morgan Stanley's Sam Min is just the first one to really understand how revenue is made and what are the chances for NCsoft, namely nothing.
If I may shed some light on this:
While I was there until last year, there were always those projects for social and mobile, but in the end NCsoft is and will always be unable to produce anything that is not MMO. If you know about the CEO a bit, he was just extremely lucky that he built Lineage and then hired a good CFO to build this whole story of a multinational gaming company that is able to generate a presence in the US, has stable sources of revenue, good publishing capabilities, blablabla. That. was. all. pure. BS.
I can tell you from my personal experience that neither he nor any of his C-levels is able to provide leadership for a company. All discussions are about "why is the monster so easy to kill?" or "why do we not have that magic powder from the previous quest anymore". The CEO doesn't understand anything on a strategic business level, but always talks about product development. That is why - and here it comes - he eliminated all casual game developments as early as 2010. He tried to manage over quality, but as we all know, casual is not developed like MMO over quality, but over quantity. Same happened for their big announcement of social: big announcements and press-releases and today nothing is there, instead all development efforts got killed. And the CEO basically thinks that anything outside development is a pure cost-function and doesn't provide any value to the company. So then no wonder that their publishing organization is so incapable to localize a game outside Korea.
I think the CEO sold his stock to Nexon at a huge discount, because he knows that there is no future for NCsoft anymore. That's why he cashed in. He knew this: 1) Korean revenue is coming down because of the government policy to close down PC cafes after midnight. These users will then go into mobile, but there is no mobile offering from NCsoft, nothing. 2) Outside Korea, their revenue was shrinking, especially in the US and Europe. China clueless and 3rd party only. Japan total chaos with an organization falling apart. And Southeast Asia only opportunistic reactions, no strategic moves. 3) Social is kicking in, user-acquisition and retention marketing is becoming important, but Ncsoft has nothing to offer 4) Cannibalization of MMO's finally kicking in. I mean how many MMO's can Koreans play in a day?
And I don't event want to mention how the rest of the C-levels/the CEO's schizophrenic brother are...
I think Sam Min of Morgan Stanley was way to mild with 125,000 Won as target price. I am pretty sure they pulled a string to achieve growth in 2012. They always do funny things like "deferred revenue" and other BS. All their MMO's are coming down and there is no other thing in the pipeline that has serious revenue potential. If you play AION in Korea, all servers are dead, end-levels are empty, nothing going on, you can't even play certain tasks, ,as there are not enough players for it.