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The makers behind Candy Crush bring you, well the company behind Candy Crush. King is set to go public towards the end of March 2014. The details of the company going public have also been revealed, and they have some interesting valuations of their company.
When they finally do go public, they plan on selling around 22.2 million shares, and no, they will not come with a bag of candy. Instead, they will come with a $21 and $24 price tag. All of this puts the company’s valuation, currently, at $7.6 billion, but are they really worth that much?
King very well may be worth that much, they are more profitable than another mobile gaming company that you may have heard of called Zynga. When Zynga went public, they were valued at around $20 billion. Though, in the end, numbers proved them to really only be at around $7 billion, still that’s more than you have in your pocket right? So to go with this valuation of King, we look at their past, and how much they have made so far.
The company has had a few games out, but most notably, Candy Crush, the game even mathematicians find to be difficult. However, that game and many others, helped earn the company a profit, let me type this again, profit of $568 million last year. Let’s compare stats here, we could talk about Zynga in this comparison, but that wouldn’t be as interesting. Zynga lost $37 million last year by the way, but no, instead we are going to compare King to a very popular gaming company, EA Sports. EA Sports makes games not only for mobile devices but for in home and mobile consoles. EA also only pulled in a profit last year of $98 million, which, looking at all the factors that’s not bad. EA has boxing and basically more overhead to worry about, but still, the numbers are mind-blowing. How is a free game making more than EA Sports in one year, and coming out on top while other mobile game developers are falling behind?
Simple answer to that question is in app purchases. If you have played Candy Crush, and we are sure you have, you know that you can buy things to help you throughout the game. Sometimes, you get so frustrated you think what’s a dollar really? You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that, since 5% of users are thinking the same thing and making in app purchases inside King’s games. That may seem like a small percentage, but keep in mind, there are more than 400 million users at any monthly time. For these reasons, their valuation is not really looked at with a sideways glance.
So we sit and wait for King’s IPO, and we watch as they either succeed or give us another show like Facebook did when they went public. Though with numbers like this, their odds look pretty good.