The Times of India:
Two IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) graduates are set to become dollar billionaires overnight and take their internet gambling company, Party Gaming, into the big league of big British brands alongside British Airways, Marks and Spencer, Boots and Sainsbury’s by floating in London.
The two IITians, Anurag Dikshit and Vikrant Bhargava, are based in the British dependency of Gibraltar, situated on a narrow rocky promontory in southern Spain. The London Stock Exchange flotation, which Kitts confirmed would be completed by June-end, is expected to be worth $10 billion.
It is the LSE’s biggest flotation since the £29-billion listing of Orange, the mobile telephone company, four years ago. Their company, founded with a Californian porn heiress and her husband in 1997, is to make rupee millionaires of hundreds of the call centre employees in Hyderabad.
Commentators said Dikshit, Party Gaming’s biggest shareholder with a stake of roughly 40 per cent and his college chum and current marketing director Bhargava, epitomised a “revolutionary business model, which makes nothing, sells nothing and profits purely from greed.”
But in large part, Party Gaming’s success is put down to the explosive growth of the global gambling market, which is expected to touch nearly $300 billion by 2009. Online gaming is a hefty chunk of that, valued at roughly $23 billion.
Also read Party time for online gaming firms
in Times Online (UK).
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