Yoshikazu Tanaka, Japan’s youngest billionaire, is considering an overseas listing of the Gree Inc social-networking company he founded amid the busiest year for US Internet-related initial public offerings since 2000.
“Numerous Japanese companies have listed overseas after doing so on the Tokyo Stock Exchange,” 34-year-old Tanaka, owner of the nation’s second-largest networking service, said in an interview in Tokyo on Monday. “We would like to consider such an option as well.”
Such a move would allow Gree to join LinkedIn Corp and China’s Renren Inc (人人) among companies capitalizing on the growing investor appetite for social-media stocks.
The number of Internet-related filings for IPOs in the US has climbed to the highest in 11 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, including Zynga Inc and Groupon Inc.
More than 50 Internet-related companies have filed for IPOs in the US this year, the most since 164 companies in the industry announced plans for initial offerings in the US during all of 2000, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
An overseas listing would help Gree raise its profile outside Japan, even though the social-networking site operator isn’t in need of funding, Tanaka said.
The Tokyo-based company, which in April agreed to buy US-based OpenFeint Inc for US$104 million, might continue to pursue acquisitions as it seeks to expand beyond Japan, he said.
Tanaka set up Gree in 2004 as a social networking service. Two years later, KDDI Corp, Japan’s second-largest mobile-phone operator, decided to invest in Gree to expand its game business.
KDDI owns 7 percent of Gree shares, while Tanaka controls 48.9 percent, according to Bloomberg data.
Gree now has 25 million user accounts. It posted a profit of ￥4.7 billion (US$58 million) in the year ended in March on revenue of ￥16.37 billion, according to Bloomberg data.
“If the Japanese market shrinks, we would need to be a global company, or our business would shrink,” said Tanaka, whose wealth was estimated at US$2.2 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s latest list of billionaires.
Tanaka aims to boost the number of users to 1 billion.
That goal “wouldn’t be unrealistic” given the number of subscribers is currently about 100 million now when combined with OpenFeint, he said.
Earlier this month, Zynga, the maker of social games, including FarmVille and Texas HoldEm Poker, filed to raise US$1 billion in an IPO, the biggest for a US Internet company since Google Inc in 2004.
Zynga, which leads the market for games played on Facebook Inc’s site and other social networks, is joining the biggest wave of Internet IPOs since the dot-com heyday in 2000.
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