Angry Birds Valued at $1.2 billion and May Go Public
Angry Birds is the best selling mobile game for the smartphone era, with several releases across nearly all mobile platforms. Recently valued at $1.2 billion, Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka (creator of Angry Birds) reckons that the company could be worth more stating, “We’re happy with our valuation but we think it’s probably a bit north of that.”
Angry Birds was first made famous through its feature game app on the iPhone platform. Users can now download the world renowned app for Android, iOS, Chrome, Playstation, Mac OS, Windows 7 and Google+. After over 12 million downloads were reached through the Apple Store, the Finnish company decided to go ahead and release various versions of Angry Birds, now offering four different titles, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Magic. Additional revenue for the company in recent years has come from merchandising, reaching in the millions every month. According to the the company’s website, stuffed toys alone are shipping “a million units a month.” As if a stuffed toys weren’t enough, Rovio also offer Halloween costumes, movie licenses and clothing.
Vesterbacka gloats that, “We are very, very profitable. We’re not a publicly traded company yet we can fund our own growth.” He also has visions for the company to float, yet he hasn’t disclosed a date… “maybe a year from now,” he exclaimed in a recent interview. Rovio will be making its public stock offer.
We really doubt that the company would fair well with an IPO. The health of the company relies heavily on a single game! Unless Rovio start to roll out more products and diversify their holdings outside of their current assets and IP’s, they could risk public launch failure. Perhaps they’ll acquire some smaller companies and technologies? Maybe some more IP’s? Who know’s, but hopefully Vesterbacka will continue doing whatever he’s doing, because it seems to be serving them well for the time being.
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