Kim Chang-han was the idea behind PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds or PUBG in 2017.
Kim Chang-han, a former computer prodigy who won national coding competitions in South Korea in the 1980s, had reached his lowest point. It was 2014 and he had just fired a third of the employees from his gaming startup. Since 2000, he has created three online multiplayer games for three start-ups that have all fallen.
“It was the darkest moment of my life,” Kim, 46, recalled. The following year, he sold his business to the company now known as Krafton Inc., which he joined as executive producer.
Then his fortune began to change. As a last attempt to succeed in business, he decided to do what is known as a Battle Royale game, an online game in which players compete with each other in a constantly falling battlefield to be the last person in feet. “Every fiber in my being told me to play this game,” he said.
Kim persuaded Irishman Brendan Greene to join the company and move to South Korea as the game’s creative director.
Bluehole Inc., as Krafton was called at the time, released PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds or PUBG in 2017. It became one of the most successful games of all time, with over 70 million copies and PC versions and consoles. mobile being downloaded about 600 million times, according to Krafton.
The company is now planning an initial public offering (IPO) in the middle to the end of 2021, which could be the largest in South Korea in recent years. The sale of the shares could raise billions of dollars, said Kim, who became Krafton’s chief executive last year in an interview in Seoul, refusing to give further details.
The IPO could appreciate the startup by up to 30 billion won ($ 27.2 billion), according to a January 5 report by Eugene Investment & Securities Co.
South Korea is set to raise up to $ 10.9 billion, a record, by more than 120 IPOs this year, according to the brokerage. KakaoBank Corp., the largest lender exclusively on the Internet, and battery unit LG Chem Ltd. will make initial stock sales in 2021, according to the report. The rise in IPOs comes after South Korea’s benchmark stock index gained 34% in the last 12 months, one of the best performances in the world.
The country’s largest IPO was Samsung Life Insurance Co.’s $ 4.3 billion offer. in 2010. This was followed by a $ 2.4 billion listing of Netmarble Corp., a Seoul gaming company, in 2017.
Krafton, whose name represents a commitment to mastery, runs four gaming studios, but PUBG accounts for the vast majority of its sales and profits, according to Kim. It had revenues of more than $ 1.1 billion in the nine months ended September, according to a company record.
Some people are concerned about whether the company is a “miracle of success,” said Han Kim, general partner and co-founder of Altos Ventures Management Inc., which owns shares in Krafton. “I think the most important thing is how the company can use PUBG’s intellectual property and how it can turn it into an even bigger franchise.”
Kim Krafton said the company is creating an animated show that will be uploaded to streaming services and a cartoon on the internet. Eventually he will make movies and dramas, he said. The company is open to acquisitions in these areas, Kim said.
Krafton founder Chang Byung-gyu is the largest shareholder with a 17% stake on September 30, followed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., which owns 16% through a subsidiary, according to a Krafton case. Kim has 1.5%.
Kim won a personal computer competition organized by the South Korean Ministry of Science in 1985, when she was 10 years old, and continued to claim several other national coding awards. He co-founded Ginno Games in 2009 after being involved in two other startups and was “very frustrated” when his game failed.
But that’s still behind Kim as Krafton prepares to go public. He said he was determined to expand the company’s gaming repertoire beyond its initial success. The company plans to launch a new Battle Royale mobile title this year that will be based on PUBG, another PUBG PC and console game until next year, and a survival game in 2022 that will describe the PUBG universe three centuries in the future.
“We will not remain as a miracle of a single success,” Kim said.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published in a syndicated stream.)