The news has just fallen in the world of finance and online games: the parent company of Pokerstars has just bought Sky Betting & Gaming for the tidy sum of $ 4.7 billion. Indeed, The Stars Group, which is therefore the owner of the giant Pokerstars, recently announced the takeover of Sky Betting & Gaming. The amount of the transaction may seem rather crazy and also happens to be a record: $ 4.7 billion.
We are witnessing here a very good financial transaction which will allow The Stars Group to become quite simply one of the largest online gambling firms in the world. A place that will also allow it to now be able to compete with another giant in the gaming world which is GVC Holdings, a firm that controls successful online gaming sites like Ladbrokes Coral or even bwin, to name a few. .
When The Stars Group becomes huge
We are a long way from that time when Pokerstars was just the biggest online poker room in the world. Now and with this takeover, The Stars Group, a firm which also owns Full Tilt Poker, has become a very large group capable of acting also in the world of online sports betting and casinos.
Following this agreement with Sky Betting & Gaming, one of the most important players in the UK gaming market and which specializes in sports betting, The Stars Group has just spent $ 3.6 billion in cash. Then $ 1.1 billion is added with the acquisition of more than 37 million shares in the structure and here is a total of the transaction which is therefore brought to $ 4.7 billion; one of the biggest expenses ever in this market. A very fine transaction which allows it to become a leader in this market and therefore to become globally dominant given that this British online games market is the largest regulated market in the world.
An ambition dating from 2014
If The Stars Group is on the verge of becoming a major player in the three most important verticals of online games which are sports betting, poker and casinos, it should be known that this did not happen overnight. . It was indeed an ambition displayed by the firm in 2014, at the time when it was still called Rational Group, and when Pokerstars was acquired. It will indeed take a few months to fully finalize this transaction, but we can say all the same that, less than four years later, it is almost done and that the challenge has been met; although the transaction will not be effective until the third quarter of 2018. On this occasion, The Stars Group also said that the agreement “identified cost synergies of at least $ 70 million per year”.
It all started in 2014
As we relate to you, the deal began in 2014 and this week’s deal is almost as big as the one in which Amaya, the former Stars Group name, acquired PokerStars that year, for 4.9. billions of dollars ! The Canadian online gaming specialist The Stars Group Inc. (TSGI), formerly Amaya Gaming, announced on Saturday morning April 21 that it had acquired Sky Betting & Gaming from the owners CVC Capital Partners and Sky PLC for an amount of 3.8 billion dollars. ‘euros ($ 4.7 billion); after buying CrownBet, Australia’s No.2 in sports betting last February.