Back in September, King was rumored to have taken the first steps towards offering an IPO when by filing an S-1 Form with the SEC (which, it turns out, wasn't true). Today they're taking one of the last. The company announced this morning in a press release that they have "filed a Form F-1 with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering of ordinary shares."This doesn't mean those share are for sale quite yet - or that we even know how many of them there will be or their initial price - but we're closer to finding out. The F-1 provides investors with all of the information they might need before making a decision regarding King stock. You can read the whole thing here.Once the IPO is live, King plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "KING," and a whole bevvy of business names will be acting as joint book-running managers: J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, MofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital Inc., Deitsche Bank Securities Inc., and RBC Captial Markets, LLC. The first three of these will act as representatives of the underwriters in addition to book-running managers.How the stock will perform once it is live, though, is anybody's guess. Some might be quick to point to the rise and fall of Zynga (ZNGA) as a cautionary tale for investors, but despite their similar nature in some respects (both are providers of free-to-play games, and both were #1 in that market at the time of their filing), the two are incredibly different companies.
Some complex financial news this morning as we have just learned that Zynga will be pursuing a secondary stock offering in the hopes of raising $400 million. However, and here's where things get tricky, only a specific class of stocks are going to be sold and the driving purpose behind the move is not to raise money for the company, but rather to force those already holding stock to hang onto it for a longer term.