Green Man plays up its future as sales soar
SALES have surged at Green Man Gaming, an online games retailer that is exploring a £100m stock market float.
Launched in 2010, Green Man has sought to challenge the traditional video games market by allowing players to buy digital copies of games rather than DVDS or other physical formats, and then trade them back at a later date.
Turnover for the year to December 2017 rose 28pc to £45.7m, according to accounts filed with Companies House. Losses before tax shrank from £2.4m to £931,000. After appointing mid-market investment bank Numis earlier this year, it is Green Man’s overseas operations that are driving growth. Sales outside of Europe increased 42.8pc to £34m. Its top-line figures in the UK and the rest of Europe were broadly flat, at £2.6m and £10.9m respectively.
Green Man, which has 4.5m customers and operates across 195 countries, is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and former Army captain Paul Sulyok.
Having served in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, he worked for Citibank before founding Green Man. He went on to acquire Playfire, a social network for gamers, with heavyweight backing from the likes of Lovefilm founder William Reeve and Brent Hoberman, who set up Lastminute.com.
Mr Sulyok said: “Green Man Gaming is enjoying strong growth … But there is still a huge amount to play for in one of the world’s largest entertainment sectors – video games. We look forward to scaling our platform and bringing the magic of games to ever more people around the world.”
Green Man offers 6,500 titles and works with 750 publishing houses and 17 development studios.
The company flexes to local jurisdictions by offering 82 differing payment systems and 16 currencies, and can operate in four different languages. Mr Sulyok is one of five Green Man directors who saw their combined pay increase from £463,000 to £561,000. The highest paid director – understood to be Mr Sulyok – received more than half of this amount, some £296,000.
The UK is the world’s fifth largest video games market in sales terms, after China, the US, Japan and Germany.