King Digital Entertainment, the maker of hit mobile phone game Candy Crush Saga, expects to be worth up to $7.6 billion when it goes public this month as the Irish company looks to take advantage of strong demand for technology investments.
The successful IPO of Twitter in November and a surge in Facebook’s share price have led to speculation that a string of technology firms could come to market, including music-sharing service Spotify, lodging service AirBnB and payments company Square.
King should also get a boost in its US initial public offering from a surge in shares of digital coupon company Coupons.com after it went public on Friday. Shares of Coupons.com doubled after being priced above the company’s planned IPO range.
King Digital said it expected to price its IPO of 22.2 million shares at between $21 and $24 per share. At the top of this range, the company would be valued at about $7.6 billion.
The offering is scheduled to be priced on March 25 and the stock will start trading on March 26.
The Dublin-based company will sell 15.5 million shares in the offering, while stockholders, including Apax Ventures, will sell 6.7 million shares, the company said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
King is hoping to benefit from a shift towards mobile platforms, social networks and app stores. The company derived 73 per cent of gross bookings from mobile users in the fourth quarter ended December 31.
In February, an average of 144 million daily active users played the company’s games more than 1.4 billion times per day, the filing showed.
The King IPO will raise as much as $532.8 million at the top-end of the planned range. It filed for a $500 million placeholder in February.
Reuters
