Meet the coder-turned entrepreneur who introduced Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja to China
- Chen’s firm raised HK$745 million in one of the biggest floats for a Chinese gaming company this year
- Chinese gaming giant Tencent is iDreamSky’s biggest backer, with a 19 per cent stake
Even most non-gamers have probably swiped their finger over the screen to try mobile titles like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja or Temple Run.
These classic games have one thing in common: In China, the world’s biggest gaming market, they were all published by a lesser-known company called iDreamSky Technology, founded by 36 year old former coder Michael Chen Xiangyu.
Last week Chen’s firm started trading in Hong Kong after raising HK$745 million (US$95 million) in one of the biggest floats for a Chinese gaming company this year. The timing of the initial public offering was unusual because the Chinese government has been tightening its regulation of the gaming industry, halting the approval of new games for the past eight months. At the top of authorities’ concerns are online addiction, childhood myopia, and unsuitable content.
Chen, who founded iDreamSky almost a decade ago in a rented apartment after years of writing code for smartphone maker Huawei, shrugged off Beijing’s crackdown as he believes his company can thrive despite the gaming freeze.
“We see an opportunity today because many people won’t persevere in this wintertime,” Chen said in an interview in Hong Kong, a day before he hit the gong at the Hong Kong stock exchange, a ritual for CEOs of newly listed firms.
iDreamSky’s current market cap of HK$6.6 billion (US$848 million) is about 25 per cent higher than what the company was worth when it was taken private two years ago – delisting from Nasdaq to inject new institutional investment from the likes of Tencent and Prometheus Capital, founded by Wang Sicong, the son of one of China’s richest men Wang Jianlin.