Candy Crush empire worth up to US$7.6bn?
The planned listing on the New York Stock Exchange, unveiled last month, is the latest in a series by Internet and gaming firms over the past three years - the most high-profile being Facebook and Twitter.
King said on Wednesday (13 March) that it was planning an initial public offering of 22.2m shares each priced at between US$21 and US$24 a share.
That could give the company a market capitalisation of between US$6.6bn and US$7.6bn.
"We estimate that we will receive net proceeds from this offering of US$326m," King said in a statement.
"We intend to use the net proceeds from this offering for working capital and other general corporate purposes, which may include acquisitions," Kind said.
The company outlined its pricing in a statement issued by the US regulatory body SEC for the New York listing.
Candy Crush - King's top-seller - started life as a Facebook game in 2012 but can also be played online and on smartphones.
Young and old play the game
Millions of commuters, teenagers - even pensioners - worldwide clock in daily to test their skills at the game, which basically involves moving brightly coloured sweets around a grid to get at least three of a kind in a row.
The highly-addictive game is free, but players can pay for extras to smooth their passage through its more than 500 levels.
Candy Crush records some 700m sessions a day and racks up daily sales of US$850,000, according to the IDATE digital research and consultancy firm.
A quarter of players said they had spent money on the game, according to market research firm Ask Your Target.
Despite its 1.1bn users, Facebook had a rocky debut after it went public in May 2012, raising US$16 billion in the biggest tech IPO on record. Its shares fell by more than half in the ensuing months, but have since recovered thanks to strong gains in mobile advertising revenues.
Twitter's IPO raised US$1.8bn in November 2013 - although shares later tumbled on warnings the short message network was over-valued.
Online gamemaker Zynga - behind the hit Facebook game FarmVille - was valued at US$7bn when it made its play on the stock market in December 2011, but it has been on a losing streak since then.
Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge
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