Abhishek Securities

  World Cricket Championship 3 (WCC 3), a 'Made in India’ franchise's gaming app, has won Google Play Store's Best of 2020 award in the users choice category. WCC 3 is the third edition of an app made by cricket gaming franchise Next Wave Multimedia. ‘Google Play Best of 2020 Awards’ are given to the most-voted  apps  in different categories on the Play Store. Commenting on the victory, Next Wave Multimedia's Co-founder and CEO P R Rajendran said the win encourages the firms to continue with more innovations and usher more features and engage even more players. He dedicated the award to "all the WCC fans out there.” The WCC franchise crossed 143 million downloads globally since its inception. As pandemic brought cricket to a standstill worldwide, 22 million downloads took place just between February and August this year. The recently launched third edition of WCC has been infused with a host of innovative and engaging features which aims to provide an immersive gam...

  Three years after  first  announcing its public listing plans in 2017, and 20 years after incorporation, Nazara is finally ready.  The gaming company is fast approaching an IPO in India and media reports  expect  the company to file its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with SEBI soon. Exits are hard to come by in the Indian startup ecosystem, more so, a public listing. This means investors end up waiting for a long period of time to attain liquidity. In Nazara’s case too, one of the early investors, WestBridge Capital, has been on the company’s cap table since 2005 when it invested $3 Mn. The private equity fund saw a partial exit in 2017, which brought down the investment firm’s 60% stake in Nazara to 21%. Now with the IPO, WestBridge Capital is  estimated  to dilute its stake from the current 21% to about 3%-4%.  So didn’t the delay in public listing worry WestBridge Capital? For Sandeep Singhal, the investment firm’s founder and MD, t...

  Rakesh Jhunjhunwala-backed  Nazara Technologies  is planning to hit the primary market soon. The Mumbai-based mobile gaming company informed its shareholders about its  IPO  plan in a letter earlier this month. “This is to intimate you that the board of directors of Nazara Technologies, at its meeting held on September 16, 2020 approved the proposal to undertake an initial public offering of the equity shares of Rs 4 each of the company through the book building process and list the shares on one or more recognised stock exchanges in India,” says the letter. ETMarkets.com has seen a copy of the same. The issue may comprise fresh shares and offer for sale of equity shares from existing shareholders. The company will soon file the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) with markets regulator Sebi. The issue size is yet to be decided, but some traders estimate the IPO price around Rs 950. When contacted, Nazara Technologies declined to comment. Nazara has a ...

Buoyed by a strong growth in its esports and early learning businesses in  India  and the  US ,  Nazara Technologies  aims to clock a revenue of Rs 450-470 crore this fiscal year, a top company executive said. Nazara Technologies CEO Manish Agarwal said the company has been delivering on its stated strategy to grow and dominate in e-sports, virtual sports and early learning verticals. He added that the company has become India's largest non-real money gaming company with global distribution pipelines. "Nazara's initiatives of developing own gaming and esports IPs and distribute them across platforms and the efforts to build capability and capacity to create highly engaging content IPs in last two years are yielding positive results," he said. Agarwal added that the company had clocked a revenue of Rs 164 crore in 2018-19 , which increased to Rs 264 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2020. "We had been growing at a robust rate, but during lockdown we saw furthe...

The Andhra Pradesh government on Thursday decided to ban online games like rummy and poker that were pushing the youth on a wrong path. The state cabinet that met under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy took the decision to ban online gambling, Information Minister Perni Venkataramaiah (Nani) said. Briefing reporters at the end of the cabinet meet, the Minister said online gambling has become a vice that was damaging the youth by ‘misleading’ them. “So we have decided to ban all such online gambling to protect the youth,” Nani said. According to the Cabinet decision, organisers of online gambling would be jailed for a year, besides being penalised, for a first time offence. The jail term would go upto two years with fine for the second offence. Also, those caught playing the online games would attract a jail term of six months, the minister added. Sandip Ginodia , CEO   A LTIUS INVESTECH PVT LTD   We deal in over 60 unlisted companies with 15 years of ex...

The fiscal year ended in March 2019 was a period of changes for Nazara Games where the company saw a shift in its customer base that consumes online games and media. The company generated operating revenues of Rs 167 crore in FY19, which dropped a mere 2% from Rs 170.54 in FY18. Breaking down revenues further, the company generated a majority of its revenues from subscription income and game downloads which decreased by 38% to Rs 94 crore in FY19 from Rs 151.7 crore in FY18.  A big game-changer was the revenue generated through its esports events, which increased 13.7X from Rs 3.6 crore in FY18 to Rs 49.2 crore in FY19. Notably, Nazara had ventured in the prolific esports space through its acquisition of Nodwin Gaming. It helped the company cash in the growth of esports games in India driven by the success of PUBG Mobile and Fortnite.  Income through freemium content also added Rs 24 crore to the company’s coffers, which grew by 58% from Rs 15.2 crore in FY19. Nazara managed t...

Gaming and sports media company Nazara Technologies today announced that it has acquired a majority stake of 51% in Paper Boat Apps. Paper Boat Apps is the company that developed Kiddopia, a popular educational games app which is targeted at kids in the 2-7 year age bracket. Nazara issued shares worth INR 43 crores to complete the final tranche of the deal. This transaction is part of the Rs. 83 crore deal to acquire a majority stake in Paper Boat Apps, valuing the company at over Rs. 150 crores. Last month, Nazara acquired a majority stake in fantasy platform Halaplay Technologies. According to the release issued by Nazara, Kiddopia now has an annualized revenue run rate of over Rs.175 crores. Kiddopia was launched in 2017 by husband-wife duo, Anupam and Anshu Dhanuka. The app has more than 5 millions downloads and over 300,000 subscribers. Anupam Dhanuka, co-founder and CEO, Kiddopia said, “This investment from Nazara has helped us focus on product enhancement and m...

Online Gaming: Stars are aligned for a strong uptake Unlike other Asian economies (like China, Korea etc), India till now has not shown major uptake in online gaming. But now with improving telco infra, evolving gaming ecosystem & with huge Millennial/Gen Z base we see growth picking up. Recent lockdown led to a strong uptake in online gaming. Monetization though may take time given nascent stage of the market. India online gaming could be classified as 1) Casual gaming ($630 mn in 2019); 2) Skill based like Fantasy games & card based (2019: $620 mn) and 3) PC/console based (2019: $650 mn). The overall gaming industry was $1.9bn in 2019 and is expected to be $8.4bn in 2024 (35% CAGR) as per Redseer, with Fantasy games growing fastest. Regulation is an overhang & could improve. Indian laws permit game of skill but not game of chance. Fantasy games have been banned/have limited access in 5 states. Some of India gaming cos are Gametion, Nazara, Dream11, Octro, Moonfrog labs. N...

Mumbai-based  Nazara Technologies  has been on an expanding spree in online gaming sector. Founded by  Nitish Mittersain  in 2000, the global gaming and sports media company boasting of a network of more than 100 million users in the country has invested in several viable start-ups over the last 18 months, including Nodwin Gaming, Next Wave Multimedia, Sportskeeda, Mastermind Sports, Paper Boat Apps, Moonglabs Technologies, CrimzonCode, Bakbuck and InstaSportz. Having business operations in over 64 countries,  Nazara Technologie s is now in the headlines for increasing its stake in HalaPlay by buying  Kae Capital ‘s stake for  14.6 Crores . This huge investment in HalaPlay makes the company the majority stakeholder in the leading fantasy sports platform. “The company has now gone ahead and bought Kae Capital’s stocks in Halaplay making it the majority investors in the fantasy sports vertical,” a statement by Nazara Technologies read. Sandip Ginodi...

According to a report "Gaming-India Story" released by boutique investment bank Maple Capital, Advisors, the investment in the industry expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 22 per cent and is currently valued at $930, million. The bank expects the industry to grow at 41 per cent annually due to the growth of digital infrastructure and substantial rise in quality and engaging gaming content. The current lock down in the country has also given a renewed push to gaming, with consumption growing at least 20-30 per cent despite significant impact on live sports,a big driver of fantasy sports gaming. Man gaming platforms are Games2win, Moonfrog Labs, Junglee Games, 99 games, and Nazara Technologies. The key trends in the Indian gaming space are multi player formats increasing,investors showing more interest in Indian Gaming startups, more and more people considering gaming as a career and increase in consumption and creation of local Indian gaming content. Sandip Ginodia ,...