Playrix: "We want to become the largest gaming company in the world"

Yesterday, the founders of Playrix, the Buchman brothers, gave a big interview to businessman Oleg Tinkov. There they told about the company’s plans, what they think about Nexters entering the stock exchange and how they feel about Zemfira’s clip. We share the main thing from the conversation.

• Playrix has become the third largest mobile developer in the world. In 2020, the company earned $2.7 billion. Only two Chinese giants had more: Tencent and NetEase.
• According to the brothers, Playrix has been growing almost all the time since its foundation — by an average of 50-100% per year. For example, last year the annual growth rate was about 50%.
• Now the developers want to make Playrix the leading company in the entire gaming market. The Buchman brothers do not know how much time they will need, but they are sure that in 3-5-10 years the company will definitely become much larger. Two things should help them: the creation of new products and M&A deals.
• At the same time, becoming the first gaming company in terms of revenue is not the only goal of Playrix. Otherwise, developers would choose not organic growth, but, for example, only mergers. They noted that there is no other major company inside Playrix right now.
• A month ago, the mobile publisher Nexters, 40% of whose shares belong to the owners of Playrix, announced its entry into the stock exchange through SPAC. The Buchmans supported this decision, but said they would not have done it themselves. In their opinion, Nexters did not have an urgent need to merge with SPAC. The company already earned a lot (more than $100 million in net profit in 2020) and grew rapidly. After Nexters goes public, its market value will be $1.9 billion.
• The founders of Nexters and Ivan Tavrin, the head of the Kismet Acquisition One SPACE firm, periodically discuss with the Buchmans a possible merger of the companies. The developers do not deny that this may happen sometime in the future.
• Last week, singer Zemfira released a clip of “Austin” about the butler from the game Homescapes. The Buchmans admitted that they have been listening to Zemfira for a long time and were delighted when she wrote a song based on their game. The developers also mentioned that the singer passed all 5-6 thousand levels of Homescapes, and she came up with the song even before the pandemic.
• Already this year, Playrix plans to release two or three new games in softlonch.