Hurray! Better Hurry With The Reinvention Thing

Chinese mobile music and wireless value-added services company Hurray! Holding (HRAY) announced unaudited Q4 and full year 2009 results today. Well, as I think we've seen across the board, it's been a dire couple of years for the music-focused mobile entertainment companies. This segment, which was the first to realize success with mobile content, is now crashing hard as ringtones fall out of fashion and full-track downloads fail to ignite any consumer excitement... anywhere. As recently as 2007 Hurray! was a $60mil company, and now it's just about half that size. In an attempt to stem the flow of red ink the company has diversified into the tried and true (?) mobile games space and is aggressively launching new titles (11 Q4 09, 12 planned for Q1) on China Mobile's portal... including the notable, but somewhat derivative-sounding "World of Legend - Magical Land". We'll see how it goes... but as it stands prospects for the company look less than awesome. Luckily for Hurray! they still have a decent cash reserve ($50mil in Q3 09) left over from the good ol' days, which buys them a little time to either right the ship or, perhaps for the cash alone, lure a buyer.