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News >> Technology >>
IIT-ians to gamble up London bourse
By agencies
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Monday, 06 June 2005, 19:30 IST
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.
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 millionaires of hundreds of the call center employees in Hyderabad.
Ian Kitts, a spokesman for Party Gaming, said "5.6 percent of the company's share capital will be allocated to its employees, which will be held in trust for them."
Individually each employee, in each of the company's three locations in 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.
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.
Dikshit and Bhargava joined with Ruth Parasol, a Californian woman who originally made her money from sleazy sex telephone chat lines and websites.
Dikshit, a computer whiz, wrote the software that launched PartyPoker, which started four years ago and now boasts it is the "world's largest online poker brand in terms of number of players and overall revenues."
Party Gaming's much-hyped flotation is expected to help pay for its proposed expensive process of worldwide expansion. But a whiff of impropriety and scandal hangs over even this and its enforced search for support from four European banks.