Angry Birds IPO? Maybe 2013, Rovio CEO Says

Addressing shareholders of the private company Monday, Hed, CEO of the nine-year-old company said its 2012 revenue jumped 10 times to $100 million, with 800 million downloads, including 200 million monthly users by December.

Pre-tax profit was 48 million euros (US $62.6 million) on revenue of 75.4 million euros, with a gross margin of 64 percent. Rovio said prior-year revenue was around 7.5 million euros. Prior-year profit wasn't disclosed.

The Finnish game maker has raised $42 million from venture capital firms including Accel Partners, which has backed scores of U.S. companies including Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), the No. 1 social network,  as well as from Atomico Ventures, owned by Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom.

Skype last year was acquired by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), the world's biggest software company, for $8.5 billion.

Hed told shareholders the year looks fantastic and said more titles were under development, including non-birds titles, as well as a proposed movie. Continued growing sales of mobile phones, where the company's games are played, bode well for the company, he added.

Analysts have suggested a Rovio IPO could lead to a company valued as much as $9 billion. By contrast, game developer Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: EA) has a market value of $5.01 billion. Zynga (Nasdaq: ZNGA), the game developer that went public in December, has a market value of $6.14 billion.