India’s tech IPO boom is facilitated by game start-up Nazara

Nazara: Billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala backed cricket games developer, Nazara Technologies Ltd. has become India’s first gaming tech firm to make a debut in market. This comes as smartphone boom has enabled mobile entertainment and games popularity. 

The gaming startup, headquartered in Mumbai, has filed for initial public offering (IPO) on Friday with India’s market regulatory body. This would lead to the startup’s debut on local stock exchanges and thus encourage other national startups to explore public markets. India has made tremendous growth in internet and mobile usage through establishment of tech giants like Paytm and Flipkart. 

Nazara was founded in 2000 by gamer Nitish Mittersain. The gaming firm has benefitted tremendously from recent boom in smartphone gaming arena on a global level. The firm was started by Mittersain with INR 30 million but was derailed during ‘dotcom bust’. The first decade of firm’s existence was spent clearing all the debt and then it steadily made its way through the market and acquired several fellow startups in gaming sector. 

The going public of Nazara is specially crucial at this time as several giants including Facebook and Google are exploring Indian markets and pouring billions to enter into partnership with Indian operator Jio Platform Inc. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos has remarked, “The 21^st century is going to be the Indian century.”

In other news, TPG backed Nykaa E-retail is too said to be planning IPO, citing this year a remarkable year for Indian cosmetic e-retailer at value of over $3 billion. Food delivery startup Zomato too is planning its IPO during first half of 2021. 

Sources reveal that Nazara is planning to offer up to 4.96 million equity shares in sale with face value of INR 4 per share. 

Nazara and its fellow gaming startups have benefited splendidly from reduced prices of wireless data and arrival of cheap smartphones in India, leading to 1.3 billion people enabling growth of the firms.