Late last week, Aristocrat Leisure announced that it is acquiring Plarium, an Israeli social gaming firm, in a deal worth right around $500 million (USD). It’s a move designed to catapult the well known slot machine maker into the digital marketplace in a significant manner.
Filings surrounding the deal were filed with Australian financial regulators last week and detail a plan for Aristocrat to pay $500 million to acquire the entire holdings of Plarium. Aristocrat will pay out the deal using existing cash holdings and make payments over a seven year period.
The Plarium acquisition is expected to boost Aristocrat Leisure’s presence in the digital marketplace in a significant way. As of this writing, the company has 1,200 employees worldwide and boasts nine digital/social gaming titles. Currently, the most popular title in its portfolio is Vikings: War of Clans.
It’s expected that Aristocrat Leisure will retain all of Plarium’s existing employees once the acquisition is completed. Plarium CEO and founder, Avraham Shale will retain his leadership role in the organization for the foreseeable future.
In a statement to the media, as reported on by the Jerusalem Post, Aristocrat Leisure CEO Trevor Croker described the deal as follows:
The acquisition of Plarium allows Aristocrat to expand our addressable market into logical adjacent segments in the fast growing mobile social gaming market. This immediately expands our addressable market from US$3.2 billion in the Social Casino segment, to US$25.4 billion when including the Strategy, Casual and RPG segments. It also provides us a stronger platform to target the US$43.6 billion overall mobile and web games market as growth segments.
Aussie financial regulators are expected to put their stamp of approval on the deal by the end of the year.