The creators of the Candy Crush Saga just filed for a secret IPO thought to be valued at more than $5 billion

September 28, 2013 Leave a comment

The creators of the Candy Crush Saga just filed for a secret IPO thought to be valued at more than $5 billion

By Roberto A. Ferdman @robferdman an hour ago

It appears the creators of Candy Crush Saga are ready to cash in on the success of the simple three-of-a-kind matching game. King, the British company behind the Candy Crush Saga as well as a slew of other social games, has submitted paperwork for an initial public offering to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the Telegraph. The UK-based technology company is expected to trade on the US’s Nasdaq exchange, and garner a value of more than $5 billion.Besides being “the biggest IPO by a UK technology company for years,” in the Telegraph’s words, what makes King’s IPO notable is that like Twitter, which filed its paperwork to the SEC two weeks ago, King has kept its filing confidential. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act allows “emerging growth companies” with less than $1 billion in annual revenue to keep their IPO filings under wraps for a period. For that reason, financial details about King’s filing are hard to come by.

The game developer, however, has enjoyed almost meteoric success. Its games are now played billions of times a month; its Candy Crush Saga game alone logs over 10 million active users a day on Facebook. While users can play the games like Candy Crush for free, upgrades and other accessories can be had for a price. King’s annual revenues are believed to be in the hundreds of millions.

Many will watch King’s IPO with Zynga, the last big mobile game creator to launch an IPO, on their mind. Zynga, valued at just under $3 billion, nose-dived shortly after going public, thanks in large part to a falling out with Facebook. King, which has almost twice as many users, is believed by many to be Zynga’s heir apparent. A successful IPO will mean convincing investors that King is not fated to follow the same course as Zynga.

The Wall Street Journal reported back in July that King had spoken with several banks, including JP Morgan, Credit Suisse and Bank of America about leading the potential IPO. Separately, the firm also offered hints of its intentions when it hired Hope Cochran as its chief financial officer, who previously led tech firm Clearwire during its IPO.

King has risen to fame on the heels of the success of the Candy Crush Saga, but the company is hardly a toddler in the tech world. King was founded in 2003, and already had roughly 10 million users before it launched Candy Crush.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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