Nazara & Friends: Why Nitish Mittersain wants cash for his M&A train

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Mumbai: Most ‘dotcoms’ from the ‘90s died in the 2000 bust. Not Nazara Technologies.

It started out selling cricket games, wallpapers and other mobile content in the 2000s, but is now best known as India’s lone listed gaming company. Yet, it is hard to determine how to value the 25-year-old company. Is it a gaming firm? Its subsidiaries span everything from sports blogging to (more recently) outdoor kids’ play areas.

Some liken it to a tech-focused holding company, such as InfoEdge, with stakes in multiple internet businesses, including Zomato and insurance aggregator Policybazaar. But, Nazara’s co-founder and joint managing director Nitish Mittersain is firm on becoming the “emerging Tencent of India". In an exclusive interview with Mint, he called it a “micro-Berkshire Hathaway for gaming".

Mittersain is pinning his ambitions on what is now an eight-year-long mergers and acquisitions (M&A) spree, snapping up games, gaming studios, events IPs, and other assets in India and abroad. And even though some subsidiaries are stagnating, Mittersain is preparing to buy more. After two fundraising rounds in 2024, the company is lining up another fundraise worth nearly ₹500 crore and bringing on new co-promoters in a massive restructuring exercise.

Can more money and owners help Nazara deliver on the goal of being India’s Tencent? Once, value added services (VAS) were Nazara’s cash cow; it billed telecom companies such as Airtel and the erstwhile Vodafone for selling mobile games and other entertainment content to users. At its peak, this was nearly 90% of the company’s total revenue. Then, things shifted: the contemporary smartphone arrived, users began downloading apps from the Google Play