Mumbai-based Nazara Technologies is looking at more acquisitions to beef up its gaming and e-sports business, which together contributed over 86% of its total revenue as of the financial year ending March 2023.

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“We have built a strong pipeline, especially in core gaming studio IPs, eSports space and perhaps a little bit in Adtech as well. We are looking at all these opportunities and hope to conclude some transactions in the next couple of quarters,” Nitish Mittersain, Joint MD & CEO of Nazara Technologies.

The recent imposition of goods and services tax (GST) on gaming companies spooked many of the players in the sector.

However, for Nazara, real money gaming, which includes Classic Rummy, made up 4% of its revenue. The rest of this segment (which had a revenue of over ₹400 crore in FY23) was from the gamified education platform for kids, Kiddopia, among others.

The e-sports vertical includes Nodwin, PublishME in the Turkey/MENA market, and Sportskeeda and Pro Football Network.

The company’s strategy has been to buy out or invest in games.

“Much of the capital will be used for driving additional M&A. Nazara has a strategy of acquire and grow, which has worked very well and we are surely going to double down on that,” he said.

Mittersain also believes that the number of gamers in the country will go up to 750 million by 2027 from the current 500 million.

“We have about 500 million gamers today, which are expected to grow to 750 million gamers by 2027. Gamers are spending today, 100 minutes on average a day playing games, which is much more than time spent on OTT and TV etc,” he said.

Nazara Technologies is a small-cap company with a market capitalisation of ₹5,876.72 crore, operating within the services sector.

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(Edited by : Sriram Iyer)