Wireless publisher Glu Mobile Inc. hopes to raise as much as $92 million with a long-awaited initial public offering, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The firm looks to become the second pure-play mobile game maker to go public, following Jamdat Mobile Inc.’s 2004 IPO. Jamdat was acquired last year for $680 million by Electronic Arts Inc., which folded the company into its EA Mobile business.
Glu gained ground in the early days of mobile gaming under the brand name Sorrent, leveraging licensed properties from blockbuster films and other high-profile franchises to secure deck space and lure gamers. But the San Mateo, Calif.-based firm has increased its presence as it expanded its scope to include more casual and unlicensed titles.
While EA Mobile continues to dominate the mobile gaming arena, Glu consistently ranks among the top publishers in the United States. Its titles account for nearly 11 percent of all recent U.S. wireless game purchases, according to M:Metrics, and the company’s Monopoly and Blackjack Hustler games are among the top five best sellers.
And Glu may have picked an ideal time to go public: While the U.S. game market appeared to be flattening early this year, overall game downloads have increased 20 percent since April, M:Metrics figures indicate.
In its SEC filing, Glu cited a recent Juniper Research report predicting the worldwide market for mobile games will grow from $3.1 billion this year to $10.5 billion 2009, marking a compound annual growth rate of 50 percent.
“We believe that the rapid growth of the mobile game market has been driven by continued advances in wireless communications technology, proliferation of multimedia-enabled mobile handsets, increasing availability of high-quality mobile games and increasing end-user awareness of, and demand for, mobile games,” the firm stated in the document.
