Man playing a game on a mobile phone. Credit: Nopparat Jaikla / EyeEm / Getty Images
Russian media mogul Ivan Tavrin, who has a long history of buying up telecom and internet companies, is getting into the mobile gaming space with a $1.9 billion SPAC deal.
Tavrin launched blank-check company Kismet Acquisition One back in August of 2020 with the goal of acquiring a promising player in the digital space. He decided on Nexters, the Cyprus-based developer behind the popular role-playing game Hero Wars, in part at least because the U.S. market for SPAC deals was quickly getting crowded.
"The reason why we raised the SPAC is because we wanted to look at opportunities, not in the U.S. but in Europe, because we can clearly see that SPAC competition in the U.S. is getting hotter and hotter," Tavrin told Cheddar. "There are more and more very qualified sponsors
looking for companies."
He said the deal environment is creating a market that favors companies over buyers, where prospects get to pick and choose who buys them.
"If you look at the fact that now there are hundreds of SPACs looking for business combinations, there's probably more product than demand," Tavrin said.
As a Europe-based company with a global, borderless customer base, Nexters was a compelling option for the new SPAC.
A Reason to Go Public
For Nexters, going public was a vague long-term goal, but it was unclear at first how it would benefit a company that had already grown tenfold in the past two years.
"An IPO is a kind of [light at the end tunnel] for any business that has emerged from people with Russian roots, but we never thought of a reason to go public," said Anton Reinhold, chief business development officer for Nexters.
The new capital won't be propping up Nexter's basic operations. Instead it will be funneled into an aggressive M&A strategy. Reinhold said he couldn't name names given the competitiveness in the mobile gaming space, but that multiple companies had already lined up.
"Look, the company doesn't need cash, so there is no plan to use this for organic growth," Tavrin said of Nexter's business model, which relies on in-app purchases for much of its revenue. "The main purpose of the capital will be to acquire companies."
M&A Boom
M&A activity in the mobile video game space is already booming. Investment was up 77 percent in 2020 from 2019, according to a report from industry-tracker Digital Development Management.
"You probably see a good deal in gaming every week," Tavrin said.
Reinhold emphasized, however, that developing its existing titles remains an essential part of its business. Hero Wars, for instance, has retained players for years, he said, by constantly providing new content.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
