King, the Swedish Creator of Candy Crush Saga, To File For IPO


    Editor’s note: this article incorrectly said Zynga’s market cap as $2.9 million. It’s been fixed to $2.9 billion

    We’ve been hearing rumors about King (previously King.com) filing for an IPO for some time, but now it’s been reported that that the Sweden-founded creator of the addictive Candy Crush Saga has quietly filed for an IPO in the U.S. The Firm is now headquartered in the UK, and is said to be valued around $5 billion. To put that in some comparison, Zynga, another company that built Facebook games but had a rougher transition to mobile Free to Play games, has about half as many users and a market capitalization of about $2.9 billion.

    The company has until today received $47 million from Apax Partners and Index Ventures. On their about page, they count more than 30 billion games played monthly. In June, they counted 92 million daily active users.

    The IPO comes at good timing with the JOBS act recently changing the IPO process to become more friendly to startups, as Candy Crush Saga is topping the Apple top grossing charts. A report this summer said it was responsible for bringing in an estimated $850,000 a day, according to Think Gaming. According to Think Gaming’s stats, Supercell’s Clash of Clans is doing $671,000 a day, for some local comparison.

    The company hasn’t shared much to investors yet, filing under the new JOBS act process that allows them to be more secretive during the public offering process. When they go more public they’ll have to talk more about revenue paths, and I suspect they will soon be doing much more with brand liscensing – for instance it seems backwards that Angry Birds have their own candy, but Candy Crush doesn’t have any candy in stores. This June, King launched it’s first liscensing deal with Happy Socks, the Nordic trendy sock maker.

    We’ll stay posted with the story as it develops.