After successfully conducting the largest-ever Initial Public Offering (IPO) ever held by an Israeli company, gaming company Playtika Holdings Corp. (Nasdaq: PLTK) rose 17.11% on its first day of trading on Friday, giving a share price of $31.62 and a market cap of $13.052 billion.
Playtika is already the sixth most valuable Israel company traded on Wall Street and has a higher valuation than veteran Israeli companies like Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) and Amdocs Ltd. (Nasdaq: DOX).
Playtika, which develops mobile games, raised $500 million, and the Chinese consortium, which acquired the company in 2016 for $4.4 billion, sold shares for $1.38 billion, and reduced its stake to 79.2%, currently worth $10.3 billion. After the IPO, Playtika CEO Robert Antokol, who founded the company in 2010 with Uri Shahak, holds shares worth $316 million and together with blocked shares has a stake worth $501 million.
Speaking to "Globes" after the IPO, Antokol said that potential investors focused in talks before the offering on questions about future growth and he told them that the company has three engines of growth. "The first is organizational growth of its strong and healthy games. The second is our road map for growth over the past 10 years, and we have acquisitions, and to date we have made seven acquisitions, and now as a publicly-traded company we have more power and can be more aggressive on that subject. The third is the technology that we are developing, which includes all the knowhow and experience and features that we have developed in one 'box,' which is technology that is unique to the company and is a crazy engine of growth."
Potential risks raised by the prospectus include the fact that Playtika is dependent on Apple, Facebook and Google for over 80% of its revenue as well as concerns that regulatory or legal restrictions could harm the company's growth because there is major opposition in some quarters to interactive social games including casino games.
In the first nine months of 2020, 57.4% of Playtika's revenue was from casino games and 42.6% from casual games.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 18, 2021
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