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Mario Ho is making waves in the gaming industry — but not the one his billionaire father, the late casino titan Stanley Ho, was known for.
Last Friday, Ho took his company, NIP Group, public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Ho holds 13.6% of the company's shares and controls 36.6% of the voting rights, according to the company's SEC filing earlier this month.
NIP Group makes money from live streams — both of esports and from third-party influencers — and event production and its esports arm. The company's relatively small-scale IPO raised $20 million, and Ho's stake was worth $69 million as of Friday's market close.
NIP Group plans to explore esports real estate, digital collectibles, and esports training camps, among other strategies, the company said in a filing.
The company did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Ho and 35-year-old Hicham Chahine are the co-CEOs of NIP Group, a holding company with subsidiaries in Sweden and China.
Chahine, a former hedge fund manager for Oslo-based wealth management firm Formue, runs the company's Western operations in Sweden. Ho, who lives in Hong Kong, runs the business in Asia, according to the company's SEC filing.
Before the duo cofounded NIP Group, Ho was the chief marketing officer of iDreamsky Games, one of the largest game publishers in China. He said on a company website that he was the youngest-ever graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management's master of finance program. Ho is also the president of the Macau Esports Federation and the vice-chairman of MSI Finance Management Company, a Hong Kong-based family office platform.
Ho is the youngest son of Macau casino heavyweight Stanley Ho. The patriarch, who had 17 children with four wives, died in 2020. Bloomberg estimates his family's net worth at $13 billion.
"I chose to do something different," Mario Ho told Bloomberg. "In my lifetime, I want to write my own stories."
According to the company's SEC filing, in 2023, NIP Group's annual revenue grew 27% to $83.7 million. The company lost $13.3 million last year, compared with a $6.3 million loss in 2022.
The company did not publish more recent financial data, but it said in the filing that it may not hit profitability — standard language for most unprofitable companies going public.
The filing also showed that in 2022, NIP Group issued a loan to Ho of nearly $300,000. The following year, NIP Group paid Ho over $814,000 for "reality show services." The company made less than $200,000 in revenue last year from its reality show service, which is part of its esports platform.
Though billed as an esports company, NIP Group made the bulk of its revenue last year primarily from managing 36,000 online entertainers — with money coming largely from fees on their live streams.
While the company is listed in the US, its leadership team is primarily based in mainland China, and some of its most prominent influencers are Chinese, NIP Group said in the July SEC filing.
