Glu Mobile IPO Could Stick It to EA

Taking a successful business model and transplanting it to a hot new platform can make for a promising investment. That seems to be the proposition behind Glu Mobile's initial public offering.

Glu, the San Mateo, Calif.-based maker of games for cell phones and other mobile devices, priced 7.3 million shares late Wednesday at $11.50 a share, in the higher end of the $10 to $12 a share range it had forecast. The company, whose stock will trade under the ticket GLUU, raised $84 million with the offering.

In an IPO market that has been friendly to some companies and cold to others, that makes for a warm welcome for Glu. The stock finished 7% higher on its first day of trading Thursday at $12.29.

The market for mobile games is nothing if not encouraging. According to market research firm Juniper Research, the global market for games on mobile devices will grow from $3.1 billion this year to $10.5 billion in 2009. That's a compound growth rate of slightly more than 50% a year.

Nearly every company that has a successful business that involves reaching customers on their PCs through the Internet is hoping for even more success on mobile devices.

Right now, bandwidth constraints and chip and memory capacity are limiting how sophisticated applications can be on mobile phones.