Abhishek Securities

  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...

Nazara Technologies is one of the leader E-Gaming Market. We have tracking Nazara for the last Three Years and expect it to do well because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Time Spent goesup by 20%. As the Covid-19 pandemic forces people to stay indoors, consumption on digital media platforms has increased. Not just streaming platforms, gaming platforms have also seen a surge of users and increase in the amount of time spent by consumers on such platforms. A recent Nielsen report shows that Indians’ use of their smartphones has increased 9% to over 3 hours 40 minutes daily compared to pre-lockdown times. Consequently, there has been a mad rush among social networking sites, OTT streaming platforms, online chat applications to get a share of this surge. Gaming platforms seem to be a clear winner as time spent on them has increased from 22% to 30% even as the share of social networking remained flat during the period. Interestingly, the report states that there has been a greater increase (55%...

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 ,...