PartyGaming, the world’s largest egaming company, has revealed changes to its relationships with its white-label partners Multipoker and Intertops.
PartyGaming has paid US$14.5m in cash for the Multipoker business, assets (including brand and website), player database and intellectual property.
Meanwhile, Intertops and PartyPoker have agreed to end their white-label agreement, with Intertops becoming an affiliate for the Gibraltar-based operator. This will enable PartyPoker to market its services to the Intertops customers and website for the next 15 months.
Former white-label partner Coral Eurobet announced last week that it was leaving the PartyGaming network, migrating its customers to a new platform in the next few weeks.
Commenting on PartyGaming's latest moves, Paul Leyland, leisure analyst at Seymour Pierce, said: “This deal is not surprising. Without being able to feed into the PartyPoker network it was difficult to see how the smaller skins would keep going by themselves.”
As for the impact this would have on Empire Poker, Leyland said it would not affect it greatly: “Empire Poker is strong enough on its own to cope with this. PartyGaming is simply moving towards what it has always wanted: total control of the value chain. And with Multipoker’s strength in the Scandinavian market, it has done so at a good price.”
Richard Segal, chief executive of PartyGaming, said: “PartyGaming’s business strategy is being implemented as planned. We now look forward to the launch of the Party-branded integrated platform in the first half of 2006, which will expand the number of games available to our customers through one account and a shared purse.”
source : egr magazine
