Zynga holds 1.8 billion dollars in cash to move into the mobile gaming world through acquisitions

According to foreign media reports, Barry Cottel Barry Cottle, director of social gaming company Zynga mergers and acquisitions, plans to accelerate the pace of acquisitions by using hundreds of millions of of billions of dollars to seek social games comparable to the FarmVille and CityVille.

After 2010 and 2011 of $147.2 million to buy 22 companies, Zynga bought Omgpop $180 million last month. In an interview, Zynga CEO Mark Ping Pincus said he expects to buy "several" companies of comparable size and Omgpop in the next 3-5 years, "We want to find a team with whom we have a common mission and vision." If we can find opportunities to accelerate Zynga's social business, we will aggressively capture it.

In the first year of the IPO, Zynga hopes to move into new areas and markets, such as mobile games, through mergers and acquisitions. Under Colter's leadership, Zynga's buy-out team is trying to speed up the decision-making process, surpass rivals in price, and better retain the talent acquired through acquisitions. Their goal: to inject faster-growing games into Zynga's game product line, such as Omgpop's "You Draw Me guess" (Draw something). "Our situation is very favorable," Colter said in an interview. We have huge amounts of cash and no debt. "Zynga has $1.81 billion worth of cash and short-term investments.

Larger acquisition targets

Spark Capital partner Nabel Haite (Nabeel Hyatt), an investment firm, sold Conduit Labs to Zynga in 2010. He points out that for Zynga, which has consistently acquired less-well-known small teams, the acquisition of a mature company that is favored by its customers and brings in revenue marks a major shift, "Colter's mission is not just to acquire a team, but to have a product that has a huge impact on the market." In Zynga, this is a whole new concept that requires different skills and we will focus on Zynga's performance.

So far, Zynga has not been able to retain most of the top talent acquired through acquisitions. The founders of at least 6 start-ups have left Zynga, including the one who quit earlier this year. Roger Dicky (Roger Dickey), who is responsible for the development of Mafia Wars, resigned last year. "Zynga's corporate culture is not for everyone," says Hatter. ”

Pincus said the vast majority of founders of the buy-out firms, including those not publicly disclosed, remain in the company.

Colter has achieved remarkable results in the field of digital gaming. In the past 5 years, Colter has helped to become the leader in mobile gaming and has become the runner-up in the field of social gaming through 2009 years of spending $400 million for Playfish.

Colter Job-hopping is the latest round of all-round competition between EA and Zynga. Zynga ploy a number of executives, including chief operating officer, Colter's supervisor John Chapert (John Schappert). EA has invested heavily in social game marketing, such as the Sims, which last year won a 1.3 billion dollar bid to win over Zynga, successfully acquiring PopCap Games, a Plants vs. Zombies developer.

Highly reliant on Facebook

Zynga and EA have developed games for free for Facebook users to earn revenue by selling virtual props. Facebook has a share of more than 90% of Zynga's revenue. Zynga is developing games for other social networks and mobile devices, including Google +, to reduce its reliance on Facebook.

Since joining, Colter has helped Zynga optimize the merger decision process. Now that Zynga's human resources department communicates with the target technicians and discovers potential technical hurdles, ping-an will also convince start-up founders that Zynga is right for them.

Zynga's thoughtfulness was fully reflected in the deal that bought Omgpop last month. Omgpop CEO Dan Pottel (Dan Porter) met with Zynga Gouroux Golapan (Guru Gowrappan), who was named "Mediator" (fixer) to help Golapan solve a series of problems, This includes employees ' health insurance and the use of Android phones in software testing.

Zynga said that after acquiring start-ups, the company struggled to retain the "tradition" of the takeover, for example, allowing the 2010 acquisition of Newtoy not to meet in Wednesday, keeping Conduit Labs weekly entertainment. "We need to understand the tradition of acquisitions, and it's important to ensure that the genes are not changed by Zynga," Colter said. ”