Candy Crush Saga Maker Midasplayer Has Filed For Its IPO Using That Twitter Confidential Trick

Interesting news from the world of mobile games and stock markets: Midasplayer, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, has just filed for its IPO:

Few financial details are available, but it was turning over around ?300m at the start of this year and has grown rapidly since then. Its games were played an average of 300m times a month in 2011 but that figure now tops 30bn, helped by the success of Candy Crush Saga, which is the most popular game played on Facebook Facebook.

There?s little financial information available because it is using that confidential IPO registration technique. The point of which is that it doesn?t have to reveal that detailed financial information until 21 days before the actual IPO itself. This allows the company to get the negotiations with the SEC over details done in privacy before presenting the clean and agreed numbers to everyone.

There?s an amusing little confusion over the name of the company as well. King.com is the name of the website where the games are available. Midasplayer.com Ltd (and there are various other international companies in there as well) is the name of the actual company that owns it all.

We were pretty sure this was coming it was just the timing that was unknown, here?s something from back in the summer:

?Candy Crush Saga? is lining up something besides jelly beans: bankers.

Midasplayer International Holding Co., the publisher of online and mobile games including the popular ?Candy Crush Saga??which involves matching up columns and rows of candy items?has hired banks to pursue a U.S. initial public offering, according to people familiar with the move.

The London company, better known as King, has tapped banks including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group Credit Suisse Group AG, and Bank of America Bank of America Corp., to handle a potential offering, these people said. They cautioned that the pricing and timing of any deal hadn?t yet been completed.

So this isn?t anything of a surprise.

The part that really interests me though is that over here in Europe we?ve got all sorts of concerned people being concerned about the fact that Europe isn?t really producing any internet giants. Therefore governments must intervene somehow in order to produce said giants. The French are doing this at the government level, my native UK has the usual suspects (Will Hutton for example) pontificating about it all. And it is true that we?ve not produced a Twitter, a Facebook or a Google Google.

However, have another look and the situation changes. We have produced ARM, the designers of the basic chip set that is in everything mobile these days and the major challenger to Intel Intel. And we?ve just seen GTA V roar to $1 billion in sales in three days. The fastest selling entertainment product of all time and that comes from Rockstar North in Edinburgh. Here we?ve the king of Facebook games and their base is in Soho in London. And if we look a little wider across Europe we?ve also got Angry Bird?s Rovio from Finland. So we do seem to be doing just fine in some technology sectors but perhaps not in others.

I don?t claim that the following is correct only that it?s a very tentative suggestion about why we might have, as Europeans, certain sectoral successes and not others. In some senses Europe is a single market: in others it very much is not. More specifically, it is not linguistically one market. Sure, you can buy and sell your way across the continent about as easily has you can across the US. But we?ve got at least 20 entirely distinct markets when it comes to languages (the real number rather depends on what you want to count. Is there really a Welsh language online market? Maybe not: Basque? Yes. Flemish and Walloon, most certainly, but are either of them really separate from the Dutch and French respectively?).

We could therefore posit that we don?t enjoy the same economies of scale where language is important. We don?t get the same network effects from having 300 million all speaking the same language that the US does. Thus in sectors where the linguistic network effects are important (social media clearly and obviously, search perhaps as well) the US is always going to be more likely to? produce the companies that grow quickly enough to be the winners. However, where language isn?t important, say in chip instruction sets, or in visual games, then European countries can do just fine, indeed beat American companies as the four I?ve mentioned are doing.

As I say, I don?t claim that this is correct only that it?s something to ruminate over.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/27/candy-crush-saga-maker-midasplayer-has-filed-for-its-ipo-using-that-twitter-confidential-trick/

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