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