Zynga IPO: Files S-1 with SEC
Big news in the tech gaming industry with Zynga’s official filing of their S-1 with the SEC. With last week’s valuation rumors ranging in the dozen billion range, the company has officially filed for a $1 billion IPO and is estimated to be worth more than $15 billion.
Zynga has best been known for mega titles like “Farmville”, “Mafia Wars”, “Cityville”, and more recently “Words with Friends”. The company itself has been an absolute monster in terms of business statistics and growth as we can see from these fun figures:
- The company has made roughly 15% profit from $597.5 million in revenue last year for a total of $90.6 million in profit.
- Zynga’s 236 million player user base spend a total of 2 billion minutes on Zynga’s servers each day to create 38,000 virtual items every second. That’s a whole lot of cows and chickens.
- Zynga’s systems see 416 million interactions between its users every day.
- From these interactions and item creation, Zynga makes almost all of their money through virtual goods. In 2010, Zynga made $574.6 million from virtual goods/online games and just $22.8 million from advertising.
- Zynga has generated over $1.5 billion in cumulative bookings since their inception in 2007.
Whether you find notifications of your Facebook friends’ new cows, chickens, and pigs to be loathsome or absolutely lovable, there’s no denying that Zynga has been an absolute game-changer in the tech gaming sector. Some would argue that they have been the poster child for the social gaming movement. By the way, they’ve announced $235 million in revenue made in the first quarter of 2011.
Buzz is also flying around that the $1 billion pricepoint is simply a placeholder and that the company could raise as much as $2 billion. And what exactly will this investment go to? Chief executive Mark Pincus states that the money will go into investments in servers, data centers, and other infrastructures so that players’ virtual worlds can be accessible instantaneously at any time from any number of personal devices. They’re also going to continue trying to develop more hit titles and (crosses fingers for investors) hopefully increase their overall user base (numbers stayed stagnant from 2010 – 2011).
Either way, we’re very interested in seeing what this IPO means for the company.
