Mobile social gaming in Japan is a huge market. One of the leading companies in that field, Tokyo–based GREE, has scored a big IPO today:
The tech IPO is not completely dead. Last Wednesday, Japan’s third largest social network GREE, launched in 2004 by the company of the same name, listed its IPO shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market for start-ups. GREE caused a sensation in this year’s lackluster Japanese IPO market with shares rising a whopping 52% from $37 to $56 on the first trading day.
The company now has a market capitalization of over $1.3 billion, which is even more than that of Mixi, Japan’s biggest social network that’s also listed (at around $970 million). The successful debut instantly made GREE the No. 4 player among Japan’s listed web companies.
– read the rest in my article on TechCrunch: