Shift Up surges by almost 50% on first day of public trading

Waifu stonks

Marco Wutz | Jul 11, 2024

Shift Up

South Korean game developer Shift Up has successfully gone public in its home country with its initial stock offers raising around $320 million USD and stock prices surging by a staggering 49% during the first day of trading.

7.25 million shares were sold throughout the day and demand appeared to be immense: CNBC said that institutional investors oversubscribed “by almost 226 times the institutional allocation” and that the general offering was oversubscribed “over 341 times” – to put it more simply: More people wanted a piece of Shift Up than expected and they were ready to pay extra to get one.

Shift Up’s IPO is the biggest of a video game company since PUBG developer KRAFTON went public three years ago. It’s also the second-biggest IPO of 2024 in South Korea in general so far.

Earlier this year, Shift Up was valued as high as $2.3 billion USD by business analysts.

Shift Up launched its first triple-A game with Stellar Blade earlier this year with the game selling a million copies in two months. Its main source of revenue is the gacha game Goddess of Victory: Nikke, which launched in 2022 and continues to rank among the top gacha earners every month.

In 2023, Shift Up signed a second-party deal with Sony, becoming a key partner in its play for the South Korean games industry.

A majority of the shares in Shift Up is still owned by its CEO and co-founder Kim Hyeong-tae, who opened trading on the South Korean stock exchange to mark his studio’s entrance, with Chinese gaming giant Tencent being the second-largest shareholder in the company.

Published Jul 11, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg