TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, JUNE 03, 2005 11:17:05 PM ]
LONDON: Two IIT 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 $10billion.
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.
Ian Kitts, a spokesman for Party Gaming, told TOI on Friday, just hours after the company's extraordinary rise to the very top of the blue-chip FTSE index: "5.6 per cent of the company's share capital will be allocated to its employees, which will be held in trust for them."
Financial experts in London said this meant Party Gaming's 1,100 employees stood to benefit from a $550m windfall.
Individually each employee, in each of the company's three locations – Gibraltar, the UK and India – can expect to receive an average of two to three times their annual salary.
The extraordinary entrepreneurial saga of an internet upstart sitting in the financial big league along with hundred-year British institutions, is said to re-write the traditional rules of wealth creation.
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.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1132038.cms