Poll: What will bwin.party do next?

When bwin.party last week confirmed it had entered into preliminary discussions regarding “a variety of potential business combinations”, those within the industry immediately began to speculate about what deals could be in the offing.

While news of the talks will have come as little surprise considering the operator’s struggles since its ill-fated 2011 merger, official confirmation from bwin.party on Wednesday still generated a huge amount of interest and kicked the rumour mill fully into gear.

Suggestions Amaya Gaming has tabled a $1.2bn offer for the company remain unfounded with some analysts remaining sceptical over whether Amaya has the financial capacity to pull-off such a huge deal in the wake of its $4.9bn Rational Group purchase.

If it is to be sold, it is thought that bwin.party would prefer to offload the business in its entirety, however, that would limit the field both on price and their likely preference to want to cherry-pick the more attractive parts of the business.

But a persistent rumour is bwin.party, in line with its ‘volume to value’ strategy, could be considering parting with its unregulated business, which now makes up a little under half of group revenues.

GVC Holdings is one of many thought to be holding a candle for bwin.party’s declining but still substantial unregulated business and it could potentially pull off a deal to eclipse its 2013 Sportingbet acquisition.

Another possibility is, of course, that the talks come to nothing with bwin.party having made clear that “there can be no certainty as to whether or not they [the talks] will result in any form of transaction with any party”.

With this in mind, eGaming Review would like to know what you think the likely outcome will be. Do you think the company will be sold as whole? Will it be broken up and sold separately? Or perhaps the talks will come to nothing? Have your say on the right-hand side of the page.