The Gala Coral group has completed the move of all of its online casino products onto the Playtech platform, following the 10-year deal signed last year.
With Coral betting already running on the Geneity sportsbook platform acquired by Playtech for an initial £11m earlier this year, the online gaming software supplier only has the migration of Coral Poker from the Ongame network and Gala Bingo from a proprietary platform onto its own Virtue Fusion bingo network left to complete.
Playtech’s deal with Gala Coral (CEO Carl Leaver pictured above) to supply all of its online gaming and betting products is worth a reputed €5m a year to the supplier. Playtech provides the gaming products (casino, poker and bingo) to the UK’s best performing operators of recent years - bet365 and William Hill - with the latter also benefitting from the injection of affiliate and marketing assets by Playtech into William Hill in 2008 for a 29.5% share in the William Hill Online JV.
But with William Hill having narrowly survived a shareholder revolt last week over an incentive package awarded to CEO Ralph Topping, the software provide could find itself challenged at tomorrow’s AGM in the Isle of Man over several issues. These include the proposed re-election of chairman Roger Withers, the urgent need to appoint more non-executive directors to its board and its strategy of buying businesses from founder and 48% shareholder Teddy Sagi.
Should the full consideration for the PTTS business it acquired from Sagi last July be triggered, the Playtech founder stands to make around £385m from selling businesses he owns back to Playtech since the company listed on London’s AIM market in March 2006. He also made £165m at the float, potentially taking the amount Sagi has taken out of the company since it listed to approximately £550m.
Playtech CFO David Mathewson said at the group’s first quarter results presentation two weeks ago that it remained optimistic of hitting its target of moving to a Premium Listing on London’s main list by the end of June, having cleared one corporate governance hurdle by buying out chairman Roger Withers’ 300,000 shares for £500,000.
