Mail.ru Gets its IPO, Plans on More Acquisitions
Russian company Mail.ru announced its IPO, posing some 32.93 million shares at $27.7 per share or equivalent to 17% of the company’s worth. All in all, it amounted to $5.71 billion and gave the company $916 million additional revenue. Mail.ru has gotten their IPO ahead of Facebook, a company they’re heavily invested in, while both Facebook and game app developer Zynga discourages IPO by imposing fees.
Mail.ru is under Digital Sky Technologies, a leading Russian internet investor whose assets include a number of large networks, including virtual worlds, chat tools like ICQ, and other real-time mechanisms.
According to a Reuters report, this “makes it (Mail.ru) Europe’s largest listed internet business.”
Mail.ru is facing lawsuits from several directions including from EMI Music Publishing group claiming that both Mail.ru and Vkontakte are aids of copyright abuse.
“Mail.ru said the net proceeds from the primary portion of the offering would be used to fund, in part, the agreed acquisition of an additional 7.5% equity stake in vKontakte, Russia’s largest social networking site measured by daily unique users, for $112.5 million,” This is all in addition to it’s existing investments which include about 5% or less of Groupon, Facebook and Zynga.
Right now investments seems to be a large part of Mail.ru’s strategy, which is common after reaching the point of an IPO. It’s clear that Mail.ru is taking the European tech scene by storm, and is highly interested in th US market as well. Social gaming and mobile networking is of heady interest to the massive company. With Japan and China growing in market share as well, the international scene has reached a major inflection point, especially as different sectors seek different monetization methods from their user interaction. It all plays into the globalizing economy, which will be leveled a great deal by virtual exchange.
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