South Korea’s Netmarble Games began selling its shares to interested investors Tuesday as the company prepares to go public on Korea’s main bourse Kospi on May 12. The share sales will continue until Wednesday.

The Korean mobile game giant is offering 16.95 million shares at 157,000 won ($138) apiece, which is at the top of the initially proposed price range. This pricing scheme would let Netmarble raise 2.66 trillion won and would set the firm’s market capitalization at around 13.3 trillion won.

Of the 16.95 million offered shares, 20 percent or 3.39 million shares were set aside for purchase by individual investors . 

On Tuesday when the share sales began, individual investors placed orders for around 5.49 million shares, marking an overbooking ratio of 1.62:1, according to the IPO’s lead manager NH Investment & Securities.

Once listed, Netmarble is set to become the 21st top-valued company on the Kospi, above major companies listed on the bourse including LG Electronics, Lotte Chemical, Kia Motors and LG Household & Healthcare.

Netmarble’s market cap is also set to leapfrog Kospi-listed NCsoft, one of Korea’s biggest online computer game companies, whose market value stood at around 7.6 trillion won as of Tuesday.

With the funds raised by the IPO, Netmarble is planning to make bold investment in larger strategic mergers and acquisitions to drive forward its global expansion and widen its business portfolio.

It will leverage the newly-generated capital to invest up to 5 trillion won toward strategic M&As, said Netmarble Games CEO Kwon Young-sig during a recent press conference in Seoul.

“Given the size of the IPO, we believe we can pursue larger-scale M&As to boost our global expansion,” Kwon said. “We will actively look into M&As with companies we can synergize with, though we are unable to share further details.”

The Korean game giant is expected to continue its efforts to drive up its presence in the West via M&As. It has already made moves in this direction, acquiring US game maker Kabam’s Vancouver studio last year and puzzle game developer SGN, now named Jam City, in 2015.

Backed by China’s Tencent, Netmarble Games is the world’s ninth-largest game publisher in terms of in-app sales, according to app analytics firm app Annie. Around 50.5 percent of its 2016 revenue was generated overseas.

The company specializes in mobile games, releasing hit titles including “Lineage II: Revolution,” “Everybody’s Marble,” “Seven Knights” and “Marvel Future Fight” in global markets.

In 2016, Netmarble posted 1.5 trillion won in revenue, up 40.4 percent on-year and 295.4 billion won in operating profit, up 31.3 percent on-year. 

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)