The underwriters of the initial public offering (IPO) by Israeli casino and casual gaming company Playtika Holdings Corp. (Nasdaq: PLTK) have exercised their options to buy additional shares for $281 million.
The IPO was held last Thursday at a price of $27 per share and a company valuation of $11.1 billion. Since then the share price has risen by 18.5% to $32, giving a market cap of $13.1 billion. The options being exercised by the underwriters are not new shares in the company but rather 10.4 million shares held by the Chinese consortium Alpha Frontier, which controls Playtika.
In the IPO, Playtika itself raised $500 million in new shares while Alpha Frontier sold shares for $1.38 billion. With the underwriter options, Alpha Frontier has now sold shares for $1.66 billion.
Alpha Frontier acquired Playtika in 2016 for $4.4 billion and after selling shares for $1.66 billion is left with a 77% holding. Playtika cofounder and CEO Robert Antokol holds a 2.4% stake currently worth $320 million and with the blocked shares he also holds his stake is worth $507 million.
The underwriters in the Playtika IPO were Goldman Sachs, UBS, BofA Securities, Baird, Stifel, Cowen and Wedbush Securities.
Last week's IPO was the largest ever held by an Israeli company and Playtika is now the sixth most valuable Israeli company after Check Point, Novocure, NICE Systems, Solaredge and Wix.
Playtika develops mobile phone games and distributes them mainly through Apple, Google and Facebook, which are responsible for more than 80% of the company's revenue. Casino games accounted for 57.4% of the company's revenue between January and September 2020 and casual games for the other 42.6%.
Playtika revenue amounted to $1.8 billion in the first nine months of 2020 and EBITDA was $666 million.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 21, 2021
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2021