Index Creative Village Plc, an event organiser and marketing service company, has refreshed its plan to list on the Market for Alternative Investment (MAI) after it bought back a 50% stake from Wave Entertainment in April.
Kriengkrai Kanjanapokin, the company's founder and group chief executive, said that the firm has spent 410 million baht to repurchase 50% of its shares from Wave Entertainment, leading its share ownership to a combined 93.6%.
The remaining 6.38% belongs to the Maleenont family, owner of BEC World Plc, the operator of Channel 3.
SET-listed Wave Entertainment acquired a 50% stake in event organiser Index Creative Village for 430 million baht as part of its plans to become a lifestyle and entertainment leader in Asean in 2015.
"We've repurchased our stake because we want to transform our firm into a 'real & digital Xperience' provider. We are finding new business partners to support our digital move," he said.
According to Mr Kriengkrai, the company expects to achieve the listing plan on the MAI over the next two years to raise funds for future expansion.
The company delayed its IPO plan since 2020 due to the Covid-19 outbreaks.
He said the company has resumed its investment since early this year after the overall event industry rebounded in the first half of 2022 owing to the improvement in the Covid-19 situation.
Businesses have also begun to restart promotional activities for their products and services, while marketers have started using their budgets to launch events for products and services in a variety of industries including real estate, consumer products, automobile, banking and leasing, investment, technology and innovation, and fashion.
"We expect the entertainment event business to see a full recovery in the fourth quarter. We believe the overall event and organising business will see a full recovery in 2023 if there are no big negative incidents occurring next year," said Mr Kriengkrai.
He projects the company's revenue in 2022 to increase by 54% from the previous year to 965 million baht and get back to the pre-crisis level of 1.5 billion baht next year.
Index reported 628 million baht in total revenue in 2021. Some 56% came from creative business development, 35% from marketing service and 9% from its own projects.
"We survived over the last two years because we have put more focus on creating our own projects. We now aim to boost the revenue portion from our own projects to 50% of total revenue within 2024 from 20% this year," he said.
In a move to ramp up its digital business expansion, the company recently teamed up with D.OASIS "Sandbox Metaverse", a world-class virtual world, and 30 corporate partners to establish the metaverse ecosystem and integrate business to entertainment, creativity, education and lifestyle.
