What do you do when you have a well-oiled high-performance car, but have no place to drive it immediately beyond your own backyard?
That’s the question facing Yalla Group Ltd. (YALA.US), which has consistently boasted very strong profit growth as it hones its core apps that have made it one of the Middle East and North Africa’s (MENA) top social media and gaming operators. At the same time, the company’s revenue hasn’t been going anywhere fast lately, posting single-digit gains, as it looks for new racetracks to showcase its highly streamlined body.
That summarizes the leading trends on the dashboard in Yalla’s latest quarterly results announced on Monday last week, which showed its profit zoomed ahead by 56% during the three-month period on turbocharged margins. But its revenue grew by a slower 7.1%, though that may have been at least partly due to a quirk of timing related to an earlier start to the holy month of Ramadan this year compared with 2023.