Gaming firm PhilWeb Corp. signed a share purchase and cooperation agreement with Palmary Corp. in a bid to strengthen the company’s electronic bingo business.
PhilWeb said in a disclosure to the stock exchange Palmary agreed to purchase 97,333,333 shares of PhilWeb, representing 6.78 percent of the company’s stocks, at P3 apiece. The deal is worth P292 million.
The P3-per-share acquisition price represents a 10.4-percent discount to the stock’s closing price of P3.35 Friday.
“I welcome the Palmary Group’s investment in our company, a great sign of faith in the positive developments we have attained in the past year. I believe this investment will result in positive gains for both over the next few years,” PhilWeb chairman Ma. Gregorio Araneta III said.
Palmary is an operator of electronic bingo outlets and an accredited e-bingo machine supplier to state-owned Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. for its network of electronic bingo outlets.
Meanwhile, the two parties also signed a cooperation agreement to jointly develop their electronic bingo or e-bingo businesses starting this month.
PhilWeb currently operates six e-bingo outlets, while the Palmary group of companies runs 16 branches. Palmary is also an accredited supplier of e-bingo machines in Pagcor’s network of over 300 e-bingo outlets with over 30,000 terminals.
“We are very excited about our future in the e-bingo business in cooperation with the Palmary Group. When combined with our growing e-Games business, we now have an expanding, two-fold footprint in the whole electronic gaming sector,” Araneta said
He said PhilWeb with as the service provider to 67 e-Games outlets, and along with the Palmary Group, it would co-manage 22 e-bingo outlets.
“I remain deeply committed to getting PhilWeb back to its former profitability levels, during which times we were able to pay out high dividends to stockholders and generate significant share price increases as well. We are also committed to our role in consistently increasing the revenues of Pagcor, which we have done for over thirteen years,” Araneta said.
PhilWeb is also an accredited service provider to Pagcor. It has a wholly-owned subsidiary, BigGame Inc., which has gaming licenses for e-Games outlets.
