Candy Crush IPO Priced at $22.50 a Share

Mar 26, 2014 09:21 AM EDT | Matt Mercuro

King Digital Entertainment, the developer of popular game "Candy Crush Saga," will open trading on NASDAQ at $22.50 per share.

That price would mean King's IPO would have a market value of $7.1 billion, according to Reuters.

Analysts believe the price reflects the fact that King depends on Candy Crush for over 78 percent of its overall sales.

The London-based company has added four additional games, but Candy Crush has remained its most popular game by a long shot.

Some investors have recently compared King to "FarmVille" marker Zynga, since they don't expect the company's success to last very long.

 Zynga peaked just three months after its IPO back in December of 2011, and its stock is down nearly 51 percent since then, according to Reuters.

"It's fair to say that if it was a very high-demand IPO, we would've seen the price at the upper end of the range," Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said, according to Reuters. "At the mid-point, it's a successful IPO but perhaps not a runaway success."

King is profitable however, and has less than a third of Zynga's employee base. In 2013, the company made $568 million in profit, representing a 40 percent increase from 2012.

Candy Crush debuted back in November 2012. Since then, it has been downloaded over 500 million times.

On average, 93 million people play approximately 1.085 billion Candy Crush games every day, according to ABC News.

The game brings in over $10 million a week, and was one of the most downloaded apps of 2013. 

See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?

© 2024 Auto World News, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Get the Most Popular Autoworld Stories in a Weekly Newsletter

Join the Conversation

Real Time Analytics