Nuffnang parent company Netccentric lists on the ASX, raises $9.35M in IPO

Digital media marketing company Netccentric starts trading on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) today, according to an announcement. The offering has allowed Netccentric to raise A$12.5 million (US$9.35 million). It originally aimed for A$7.5 million (US$5.6 million), which was the amount the IPO’s cornerstone investors had raised.

These investors include such business figures as Malaysia’s snack food company Mamee-Double Decker CEO Pang Tee Chew, property and financial company TA Enterprise chairman Tiah Thee Kian (who is also Netccentric co-founder Timothy Tiah’s uncle), and Kevin Shao-Chung Tsai, president of Taiwan’s Want Want China Times Group. Tsai will also sit in Netccentric’s board of directors.

As part of its IPO, the company has issued 62.5 million shares, at A$0.20 per share.

Singapore-based Netccentric is the parent company of blog advertising network Nuffnang, mobile blogging platform Dayre, and social media advertising network Churp Churp. In all, the company runs six business units in the digital media advertising front. Founded in 2006 in Singapore by Timothy Tiah and Cheo Ming Shen (following the founders’ fortuitous encounter at a Pussycat Dolls concert, of all places) with a starting capital of S$65,800 (US$48,700), Netccentric has notably never received any external funding until its IPO.

“We felt that dealing with investors and term sheets consumes a lot of time,” Tiah has previously told Tech in Asia. “Time we could use to focus on our product. We were already profitable and we could grow without taking in any investments.”

Netccentric announced it had lodged its prospectus with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission a little over a month ago. As Tiah related on his personal website at the time, the co-founders felt it was the best way to go about raising money for the company, since they had never managed to make a deal with VCs and private investors they felt comfortable with.

The company reports US$8.2 million in revenue for 2014, a 35 percent increase from the previous year. At the moment, it has offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, China, and the UK, and employs about 200 people. Netccentric claims it currently aggregates over one million publishers and connects them with advertisers, allowing them to reach an audience of 41.6 million readers per month.

With the funds raised through its IPO, it plans to continue expanding its products to new markets, specifically Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, while launching Churp Churp and Dayre in Australia. At the same time, it’s planning to cultivate more and bigger advertising clients, and also push harder towards mobile devices. Dayre, a mobile app for creating long-form blog content, will be at the forefront of that push.

The digital advertising market is heating up in the Asia-Pacific region, where digital advertising spend is projected to reach US$96.4 billion by 2018, from US$46.6 billion in 2014. Korea’s Yello Mobile network has made waves recently with acquisitions of digital marketing companies such as Netccentric rival Gushcloud and Thailand’s Adyim.