It’s go go go for China’s Sungy, raising over $80 million on NASDAQ debut

One of China’s biggest app development companies, Sungy Mobile (NASDAQ:GOMO), has just listed on NASDAQ. It’s the firm behind the popular GO series of apps like GO Launcher, GO Weather, GO Locker, Go SMS, and Next browser.

After being initially priced at $11.22 per share to raise $79 million, once Sungy’s stock started trading it climbed quickly to $14.78 per share at time of publishing at midnight Beijing/Singapore time. Aside from the IPO windfall, Sungy has also made $20 million from a concurrent private placement today, making for a total of about $100 million.

Talking to Tech in Asia via Skype from New York just before trading began, Sungy CEO Deng Yuqiang said that the IPO will “help with better recognition among overseas consumers.” Its apps have a collective 325 million downloads around the world with 87 million monthly active users. 70 percent of its app users are from outside of China.

Deng added that in the long term the company is looking to extend its reach by co-operating with game developers on social gaming, as well as exploring e-commerce.

For now, most of its apps are created for Android, and many of them are free. Sungy’s CEO says the focus on Android makes sense as it is, he says, the OS of choice of 70 percent of smartphone users. Android is also more flexible, allowing the firm to build an app empire with things like smartphone launchers and widgets – none of which are possible on iOS.

Most of Go’s Android apps are free, but some have paid/pro versions, and Deng says that revenue from paid apps is up 14-fold in the past seven quarters, when monetization first began for the company (update: corrected the time-frame; previously wrote “in the past year”). Aside from that channel, the company monetizes from ads, as well as from partnerships with third-party app makers for inclusion in Go Launcher.