The Party Gaming Offer for Empire Online Has Been Declared Official
9 November 2005

Since Party Gaming’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) in June of this year, there has been speculation in the industry about whether or not Party Gaming (currently the world’s largest online poker room) will make acquisition moves on Empire Poker, which was at one time one of Party Gaming’s greatest player attractions. However, this past week, it was confirmed by Empire that Party Gaming has in fact made a “preliminary approach”. This news has UK press reports suggesting that Party Gaming may offer as much as 400 million pounds for Empire Poker, owned by Noam Lanir. Nonetheless, many analysts are skeptical of this suggested report.

One specialist reportedly said that he had confidence that any offered price aside from the rumored 400 million pounds would be considerably low, and may explain why Sportingbet had made the decision to reverse out of a potential purchase.

The offer that was made for Empire came shortly after PartyGaming chose to split from their affiliate “skins”, which PartyGaming shared a platform with Intertops, Multipoker, Coral Eurobet and EmpirePoker. Thus, PartyGaming decided that they would dedicate operating a poker platform that was aimed exclusively at players of PartyPoker. This occurred on the 10th of October.

Shortly following this move, on the 18th of October, Empire issued a profit warning, and announced that their growth would be 10% below the original forecast which was a result of PartyGaming’s decision to switch platforms. At this time, it was in the opinion of some industry observers that a takeover would be one of the key moves in the continuous consolidation that was occurring in the industry.

However, the news of such an approach was all Empire Online needed to send their shares up to over 9% higher after early dealings that took place near the end of the week. This added 25 million pounds for a market capitalization that currently stands at a surplus of 365 million pounds.