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Zynga, the leading social gaming company behind Facebook hits such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, would likely be worth as much as $5 billion if it were publicly traded instead of privately held, according to SecondShares.com, a group of former equity analysts who spend their time researching the value of private online companies such as Zynga, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. SecondShares based its estimate of Zynga’s value on the number of outstanding shares, estimated revenue per user, growth rate and other metrics, and projected that by 2015 the game maker could have a theoretical market value as high as $10 billion.
Given the pent-up demand that such private companies represent, there’s a lot of interest in valuing them — since there is a chance they could go public someday — and also in trading their shares through secondary markets, although Facebook recently barred its employees from selling their stock through such vehicles.
The authors of the Zynga report — former Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs equity analyst Lou Kerner, former Sanford Bernstein research analyst Eli Halliwell and Gamers Media CEO Jay Gould — say Zynga is the leader in the social gaming market with 237 million monthly active users and six of the top seven social games. That gives the company more than four times as many monthly active users as Playfish, which was recently bought by Electronic Arts for $400 million. China’s Tencent Holdings is the only online game company that is larger than Zynga, the report says, with 400 million monthly active users.
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Mafia Wars!
Given the pent-up demand that such private companies represent, there’s a lot of interest in valuing them — since there is a chance they could go public someday — and also in trading their shares through secondary markets, although Facebook recently barred its employees from selling their stock through such vehicles.
The authors of the Zynga report — former Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs equity analyst Lou Kerner, former Sanford Bernstein research analyst Eli Halliwell and Gamers Media CEO Jay Gould — say Zynga is the leader in the social gaming market with 237 million monthly active users and six of the top seven social games. That gives the company more than four times as many monthly active users as Playfish, which was recently bought by Electronic Arts for $400 million. China’s Tencent Holdings is the only online game company that is larger than Zynga, the report says, with 400 million monthly active users.
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Mafia Wars!
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