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PUBG maker Krafton has applied for IPO

PUBG maker Krafton has applied for IPO

Playerunknown's Battlegrounds company Krafton has applied for preliminary approval to go public in Korea.

That's according to Reuters, which reports that the game firm has asked for the nod from the Korea Exchange. Krafton apparently generated revenue of ₩1.67 trillion ($1.5 billion) during 2020, with an operating profit of ₩774 billion ($694.9 million) for the period.

Apparently Seoul-based financial analysts reckon that Krafton is worth in the region of ₩20 trillion won ($17.9 billion). That's considerably less than the ₩30 trillion ($27.2 billion) that Eugene Investment & Securities Co. reckoned that Krafton could be worth at an IPO earlier this year.

Krafton is best-known for its Playerunknown's Battlegrounds IP. The battle royale title has shifted more than 70 million copies on PC and console since its debut in March 2017, while PUBG Mobile has been downloaded more than one billion times to date, bringing in $4.3 billion by the end of 2020. A new mobile Playerunknown's Battlegrounds title – New State – is set to launch soon, with over five million people pre-registering for the title, while there's another PUBG title coming to PC and console in 2022, as well as Striking Distance's sci-fi horror game, The Calisto Protocol.

Krafton recently reorganised its development teams, rebranding PUBG Corp to PUBG Studio and bringing it inside the company, while Bluehole has also become an internal subsidiary.

Since March 2020, former PUBG Corp chief Chang-han Kim has been the CEO of Krafton.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.