Playtika shares surge on market debut
Mobile gaming company Playtika began trading on the Nasdaq today, under the ticker symbol “PLTK”. Playtika CEO Robert Antokol joins Yahoo Finance Live to weigh in on the company’s public debut and outlook for 2021.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." It is game on for Playtika Holding, the Israeli company riding the mobile gaming wave in its public debut with shares popping well over 30% right now after it was priced at $27 a piece. Let's bring in Robert Antokol. He is the CEO of Playtika. And Robert, congratulations on your listing today.
We have seen huge growth in this space, the last year alone up about 30% according to some data from Sensor Tower. How are you looking at the timing of this and where this takes the company now that you've got this public listing?
ROBERT ANTOKOL: For us-- how are you? Thank you, I'm really happy to be here. For me and for my employees, it's a really, really special day. And we are really excited about the future.
So regarding your question, I think at the end of the day, Playtika was always a growing company, was always a cash flow positive company before the pandemic, before everything that happened in the last year. And we were always focusing on growing the business. And I think we got to the size that we need to be a public company, we got to the size that we need to have the public supporting us. And then now we are really excited about our future and growing our company.
ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the slate of games here because it includes "Bingo Blitz," "World Series of Poker," "Slotomania" some of the names in the portfolio here. But as you talk about that growth, you guys did post through the first three quarters of the year 28% revenue growth to $1.8 billion. And you split it up pretty much equally, I guess, through the main platforms here, about a third coming from Apple, a third coming from Google, and a little bit below coming in through Facebook.
When you see growth out into the future, where you are seeing maybe the healthiest prospects for that coming through here as gaming has, no doubt, been very popular with more people sitting at home on their phones?
ROBERT ANTOKOL: So, as you mentioned, our main games-- "Slotomania," "Bingo Blitz," "WSOP"-- are games that are running almost more than seven years and still growing dramatically year after year after year. So while very-- we are really-- we know that we have a very stable growth in the coming years, we grew before.
And I think our advantage on other companies is that other companies are always trying to make the new title or they're trying to develop a new game. We have still games that are growing. When you look at the top 100 games, grossing games in the US mobile games, nine of them are Playtika games. This is unbelievable. Nine of the 100 games are Playtika games.
So we are so strong. We have strong titles. And we look differently than with titles. We're not looking at them like games like other competitors. We're looking at them like a platform. This is why we can grow this title more and more in the years.
AKIKO FUJITA: Even with that success that you just alluded to, you have some pretty grand ambitions. You've been quite acquisitory over the last few years or so. As you look to the future of Playtika, what do you see as the missing pieces right now?
Now that you have been able to raise the money through an IPO, what do you have your eyes set on in terms of potential targets? And can we expect more consolidation in the space?
ROBERT ANTOKOL: So I think if you look at the history of Playtika, we were growing by acquisition and dramatically in the last 10 years. We had seven different kinds of acquisitions. And actually, we developed our own titles only, like, nine years ago. I think the opportunity was the last acquisition that we did.
We got a lot of talent and the history of doing new games for the company that we acquired, like Wooga, like Seriously. So in the next few years, Playtika is going to grow by acquisition and [INAUDIBLE] like we did in the past, and by new games that we're going to develop. So we have now more chance to succeed and more tools to grow a business.
