King.com the maker of Candy Crush Saga could have titled their first day of trading as Stock Crush Saga. The stock had a very poor performance on its first day of trading. Perhaps people were looking at King and thinking it was going to be another Zynga, wildly popular before the IPO but as soon as it went public it could not make any gains in the public market.
Zynga had Farmville and King has Candy Crush Saga, King must find more games that can provide a stable stream of income. Of course they are in a very finicky niche, what is hot today is not tomorrow, churning out hit after hit is not easy.
Bloomberg covered the opening day trading:
King Digital Entertainment Plc, maker of the “Candy Crush” smartphone game, suffered the biggest decline of a newly listed U.S. company in over four months even after it priced its shares at a discount to its major peers.
King’s shares dropped 16 percent to end trading at $19 today. King and shareholders Apax Partners LLP and Index Ventures raised $500 million in the IPO after pricing the stock at $22.50.
At the IPO price, King was valued at $7.09 billion, which made it cheaper — relative to projected sales — than publicly traded peers including Giant Interactive Group Inc. and Zynga Inc., data compiled by Bloomberg show.
You can read the full article and analysis here
A game company… with one huge hit so far. It’s hard to guess if they’ll have another, especially as earnings on “Candy(TM) Crush(TM) Saga(TM)” begin to fade.
Maybe they’ll be fortunate and get another hit, but there are a LOT of game developers these days. And when your big hit is nothing more than a ‘Match-3’ type of game… well, that doesn’t really say a whole lot about the creativity of the company. It just says they got extremely lucky and won the ‘app-lottery’.
I’d put my money elsewhere.