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Kindred has plans to sell the operator Unibet, but apparently, things are not going as smoothly as may have been expected.
Kindred’s idea of selling Unibet begin to take shape as early as the beginning of 2022 and it all started when When Corvex Management became the second largest shareholder of Kindred.
In May 2022, Corvex Management announced that it owned more than 10% of Kindred’s shares and voting rights according to Swedish regulations. After expressing its excitement at becoming such a large shareholder of Kindred, Corvex stated that the business should take an advisor for possible sale opportunities. It claimed that “A fully informed board will be in the best position to weigh any strategic alternatives, compared with Kindred’s stand-alone business plan. While we have not pre-judged any path for Kindred, we believe the board should possess all relevant market information and let the data drive the decision-making process. We look forward to continuing to work with the Kindred team.”
Although in the beginning, the chairman of Kindred stated in response that the business was nothing but confident about the current business strategy, now the representatives of Kindred have contacted several businesses in order to try to sell the Unibet operator. Among these are included the titans 888, Entain, Tipico, Apollo Global and Blackstone. The offer, however, was not received as the Kindred representatives would have expected, as it was welcomed with rather little interest.
This was because the acquisition was not considered to be valuable enough at the current price. In May, Kindred reported a decline of 30.2% in revenue for the first quarter of 2022, mainly because it withdrew from the Netherlands. Kindred currently shares a trade of 77.66 Swedish króna, which means a market capitalization of 17.64 billion Swedish króna. Last year, the business earnings 94.9 million pounds, which means 15% of its market capitalization.
According to some sources, as the sale of the Unibet operator seems rather unlikely at the moment, Covex Management may take further measures in order to help accelerate a potential deal. This may mean it will either try to obtain a change in management, or it may try to encourage the board to make an acquisition. Even so, there still is high uncertainty that any deal would be eventually reached.