If you’re here just to know the answer to the question in the title, then the answer is no, Rovio is not a public company. Rovio is a private Finnish company, located in the same city (ESPOO) where Nokia is located.

But why is Rovio not a public company?

Usually companies go public for two reasons:

1. They want to expand without paying hefty interest rates to the banks.
2. Executives want to amass fortunes by technically selling parts of their company at exorbitant prices.

Judging from the state of the stock market and the ethics of its players nowadays, I’d say that the first and foremost reason why companies go public is the second one in the above list.

Now why hasn’t Rovio gone public until now? Well, the number one reason is that Rovio doesn’t need to expand, it’s a company producing games for mobile devices and it’s doing a very good job at that (yes, these Angry Birds games are quite good – except for the last one, which is very buggy). It doesn’t need a bigger team, it doesn’t need to expand into other areas (it’s a mobile app company, after all). You might say that this exactly the case for LinkedIn, Groupon, Facebook, and the likes, and that these companies have gone (or are going) public. Well, clearly, they have gone because of the second reason.

But is it that Rovio’s executives don’t care about the money? Certainly not! They do care about the money a lot, but they think that they need to build more momentum before deciding to go public, and they will go public.

So, when will Rovio go public?

Rovio will go public as soon as its executives feel that the investors are seeing value (wink wink) in their company for the long term. In other words, they will go public when they think that there are enough dumb investors in this world who are happy and willing to put their money in a company that may or may not exist in a couple of years from now. Besides Angry Birds, what does Rovio have? And what will happen when people get tired of Angry Birds?

In any case, the media machines are working, day and night, to promote Rovio as the best company since X (US Steel), and that buying this company at IPO will be the investment of a lifetime.

But what will Rovio’s stock ticker be?

I don’t know, but here are my suggestions:

• ROVI
• ANGRY
• BIRDY
• ROVIO
• RVO
• WEHAVESTUPIDINVESTORS

I personally think that that they will probably go for Rovi (I was right at predicting Facebook’s ticker, see here).

Now, before you ask, I’m fairly certain that ROVIO will be listed in the NASDAQ, as their listing requirements are much more lax than those of the NYSE.

This article (as well as all other articles on this website) is an intellectual property and copyright of Fadi El-Eter and can only appear on fadi.el-eter.com.