Empireonline To Buy Online Casino Gambling Group

August 2 - More corporate activity and consolidation in the online gaming industry.  Empire Online, the owner of Empire Poker, has announced that it will acquire the casino operator, Club Dice, for about US$40m.  This acquisition will reposition Empire Poker from being a poker room to being a fully fledged casino operator.  This deal will see it take control of Club Dice's casino operating licence, casino business, and other assets of Club Dice including its active database of 70,000 players. In a separate deal it has also announced that it is to purchase Noble Poker, the largest Playtech iPoker Network member.

Empire Poker will take over Club Dice's licence to operate the Playtech software platform, on which Club Dice and its other three sites run. In addition, it will also purchase Noble Poker.

Empire Poker also provides marketing services for third parties such as 888.com and Starluckcasino owned by PartyGaming.

This acquisition should substantially boost Empire's casino revenue.  It's casino revenue was US$5m, and its poker revenue US$20.3m for the first half of 2005.

The CE of Empire Online, Noam Lanirs, announced that the deal was part of its strategy to be not solely reliant on any one software platform. ?In Club Dice and Noble Poker we have bought running businesses which achieve a strategic objective of diversifying our base of technology providers,? Lanir stated.

To this end the US$40m purchase, also includes a separate acquisition of the intellectual property and brand of poker site Noble Poker, but the purchase consideration will only be a small portion of the purchase price. Noble Poker is the largest member of  Playtech's iPoker network. Empire Poker will now take over the marketing of this poker room.

There is speculation that Empire could transfer its huge Empire Poker database onto another platform. Currently Empire Poker contributes about 4% of Partygaming's 2004 operating profit. However it is rumoured that contributes nearly 20% of Partygaming's liquidity!

The deal is subject to the usual shareholder approval a three-month due-diligence process.

Watch this space for more news on corporate activity and consolidation in the industry. 

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