Roblox, a famous online game creation platform in the United States, will be listed directly on the New York Stock Exchange on March 10, with a reference price of $45 per share and a valuation of nearly $30 billion.

Mention Roblox, you must be no stranger, this is a hot global sandboxie construction game, similar games and the famous "my World".

According to the prospectus, Roblox's story began in 1989, when Baszucki and Cassel wrote a 2D simulated physics lab called Interactive physics, which later influenced the way Roblox was developed. In 2004, they founded Roblox to help anyone create basic games like Lego bricks.

According to Crunchbase, the company has raised nine rounds of financing since its inception, with a total fund-raising amount of US $856 million. Roblox raised another $520 million in January, selling nearly 12 million shares at $45 a share, valuing it at $29.5 billion. In the 2020 G round, Roblox was valued at just 4 billion.In less than a year, valuations have been more than seven times higher than in the previous round of financing, mainly due to a surge in demand for games as consumers sought home entertainment because of home quarantine during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Up to now, Roblox is not only a popular game, but also based on the platform ecology of open games.The bottom layer is the cloud infrastructure and the middle layer is the game community, which gives developers and creators tools to create 3D game content simply and quickly, and can publish and operate directly in the game client. The charm of open games is that they can be both players and creators, and can generate revenue in the game world by simulating the real world.

Performance highlight: epidemic isolation promotes rapid performance growth

According to the prospectus, Roblox's revenue in 2018, 2019 and 2020 was $325 million, $508 million and $924 million, respectively, while the corresponding operating losses were $88 million, $76 million and $266 million, mainly due to software development and community services.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought explosive growth of users to Roblox.The number of daily active users (DAU) on Roblox grew 85 per cent from 17.6 million in 2019 to 32.6 million in 2020; the number of Roblox users increased from 13.7 billion hours in 2019 to 30.6 billion in 2020; and daily paying users increased from about 184000 in 2019 to about 490000 in 2020.

Roblox expects Q1 DAU to reach 37.6 million-39.6 million in 2021, an increase of 59% over the same period last year; revenue will reach $320 million-335 million, up 98% over the same period last year.However, with the recovery of the epidemic and the relaxation of quarantine, the company expects that annual growth in 2021 will not be able to sustain the rapid growth in 2020.

As these restrictions ease, we expect growth in 2021 to be much lower than in 2020, but we believe we will see absolute growth in most of the core indicators for the year.

-Michael Guthrie, Chief Financial Officer of Roblox

At the same time, the company has indicated that it hopes to expand the Western European and East Asian markets in the future, and to further expand the population of older (relative to teenagers) game users, so as to achieve faster business growth after 2022.

Prior to this, Roblox has repeatedly postponed its listing plans, mainly because of concerns about the undervaluation caused by the traditional IPO approach. "Roblox hopes to get a higher IPO pricing after seeing the soaring share prices of Airbnb and DoorDash on the first day of trading," said people familiar with the matter. The latter two companies are thought to have underpriced IPO and did not have enough financing. "

After completing the latest round of large-scale financing, Roblox announced a direct listing.Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corporation all served as financial advisers to the deal. According to its prospectus, 198.92 million shares of the company are expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange on March 10.In the latest news, on the eve of the listing, the New York Stock Exchange set the reference price of Roblox's shares at $45, the same as the latest round of financing, meaning the company is valued at close to $30 billion.For directly listed companies, the reference price is not the issue price, and the opening price will be determined by buy and sell orders collected by the New York Stock Exchange from brokerage dealers.

Roblox will become$Spotify Technology SA (SPOT.US) $、$Slack Technologies (WORK.US) $、$Palantir Technologies (PLTR.US) $和$Asana, Inc. (ASAN.US) $After that, the fifth directly listed company. What do you think of Roblox's performance tonight?