Poker party on bourse
AMIT ROY
London, June 22: Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava, the two batchmates from IIT Delhi, are selling part of their stake in PartyGaming, the online poker company, in the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) witnessed by the London Stock Exchange for four years.
They are selling 23 per cent of the shares in PartyGaming, which runs the immensely successful online Party Poker website, on which up to 70,000 people from all over the world can play at one time.
The shares, on offer to institutional buyers, are valued by the company at between 111p and 127p. This would put a value on the company of between £8 billion and £9.2 billion.
Dikshit, 34, the group’s operating director, has 40 per cent of the shares and 33-year-old Bhargava, the marketing director, 17 per cent. Even if the lower sale figure is achieved — and PartyGaming seems confident it will — they stand to make £736,000 and £312,8000, respectively, from the sale.
The precise share price will be fixed on Monday and trading on the London Stock Exchange begin on Thursday “when you and I and other members of the public will be able to buy the shares through a broker”, a spokesman for PartyGaming told The Telegraph.
The company hopes a listing will give it added credibility, especially as the Americans have laws which outlaw online gambling.
“The book is covered,” the spokesman added. This means that institutional buyers, who are the only ones allowed to purchase the shares at the moment, have told PartyGaming they are prepared to buy all the shares on offer. However, there is some haggling going on over whether PartyGaming has overvalued them.
Describing the way the game is played in cyberspace, the spokesman said: “Party Poker is a website and 10 people can gather round a virtual table. Party Poker makes its money by taking a small slice from each pot — the rake, in the jargon. The players could be from anywhere — a girl in Australia could be playing with a man in Australia.”
But not from India.
One of the ironies of PartyGaming was revealed today. “Ninety per cent of our employees, totalling 950, are in India, based in Hyderabad,” said the spokesman.
However, due to government rules, Indians in India are not allowed to play.
The PartyGaming IPO, which will probably take the company into the FTSE listing of the top 100 companies, has caught the imagination of the financial world.
For tax reasons, Dikshit and Bhargava live in Gibraltar, the “European Kashmir” whose ownership is fought over between Spain and Britain. The weather in Gibraltar is pleasantly Mediterranean but there cannot be too many distractions on which to squander their easily acquired fortunes.
The two Indians keep a relatively low profile. The best that the Financial Times could muster up in a recent profile is the revelation that Dikshit “always smiles a lot when he talks”.
