Playtica will issue $ 9 billion in global markets

The largest Israeli IPO of an Israeli company is underway: Playtica will issue on the Nasdaq at a value of $ 9 billion. Million news and the rest as part of a sale offer). The leading underwriters will be Banks Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley.

The value of the offering is probably “opening value”. Prior to the IPO, the value usually increases and during trading on the first day it rises by tens of additional percent.

Additional underwriters to participate in the offering are Goldman Sachs, UBS, City Group, and BofA Securities. Co-managers will be Baird, Cowen, Stifel and Wedbush Securitites.
Of the shares to be issued, 21.7 million of the shares will be offered by Playtica itself and 47.8 million will be sold by an existing shareholder, with underwriters being given a 30-day option to buy an additional 10.425 million shares from it.

Playtica develops mobile games and a monetization platform and has a monthly monthly number of 35 million users. The company was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Herzliya. Playtica employs about 3,700 people in 19 offices around the world, in Israel, England, Germany, the United States, Canada, Romania and more.

The company, which is among the largest in the world in the field of online games, enjoys impressive growth in revenue and adjusted profit. Revenue for the first nine months was $ 1.8 billion, compared to $ 1.4 billion in the same period last year. EBITDA rose to about $ 670 million – an increase of about 40% compared to the same period last year.

It is difficult to deduce the representative profit of the company mainly because there are a lot of one-time expenses this year (option payments and more). But the adjusted profit is probably in the region of $ 600-700 million a year.

Playtica was founded by the Israeli – Robert Antokol, who still runs the company. In 2016, the company was sold for $ 4.4 billion to the Chinese Alpha Frontier, but Antokol still remains with minority holdings (2.6% of the share capital), with the Israeli connection also in the development centers in Israel and a relatively large number of Israelis working for the company.

The increase in activity in the last year is a continuation of continuous growth in recent years, with the company emphasizing the expansion of the amount of games it operates alongside the improvement of the quality of the games. Most of the revenue comes from players in the US (about 71%) with the rest coming mainly from Canada, Europe and Australia.

Playtica relies on traffic from Apple, Google and Facebook. The traffic from Apple generated revenue of $ 620 million, the traffic from Google brought in $ 605 million and Facebook generated $ 215 million (out of such revenue of $ 1.8 billion)

The boiling IPO market may make 2021 a dream year for Israeli high-tech and Israel in general. This period may turn out to be a short window of opportunity, and Israeli companies will not want to miss it. While in mid-December we wrote that about 20 Israeli companies on their way to Wall Street, in less than a month, REE, Tabula, Outbrain, SimilarWeb and more were added to this list.