I won't be hurried into bad deals, says GVC chief
Kenneth Alexander says he's prepared to walk away from M&A negotiations if the price isn't right
GVC Holdings chief executive Kenneth Alexander (pictured) said his firm, which has been linked to a deal with bwin.party, won’t be hurried into M&A activity and is prepared to walk away from negotiations should sellers demand too high a price.
Speaking to eGaming Review after his company posted a 17.5% growth in net gaming revenues for the first four months of 2015, Alexander reiterated GVC’s enthusiasm to replicate its 2013 Sportingbet acquisition but said he was prepared to sit tight and wait for the right deal to surface.
“We are always looking for opportunities but I’m prepared to be patient and sit,” Alexander said. “If people are asking for too much money then I’m quite happy to walk away, I don’t need to erode value by doing bad deals.
“Our priority is to keep the organic growth going but if there are deals to be done that are in our shareholders’ interests then we’ll definitely exploit them,” he added.
While Alexander wouldn’t be drawn on whether the firm was currently in M&A discussions – it has previously been linked to Stan James and bwin.party – he did confirm the UK market remained high on the agenda.
The chief executive also said plans to move into the Asian market had been “progressing slowly”, partly due to a planned hire of a person to lead the venture having fallen through at a late stage.
“We are still looking at building that [Asia] team up and we have made progress but we’re not ready to press the button on it yet,” Alexander said.
“It’s not the end of the world if we don’t find someone [to head it up] this year as I’d prefer to wait in order to find the right person rather than take someone and throw them in there and lose money,” he added.
In its trading update, the firm said its performance had been checked by punter-friendly results during the period, which saw margin fall from 9.62% to 8.75%.
However, Alexander said he wasn’t “too worried” with sports turnover up 21% partly due to a level of customer recycling, while it was also less exposed to bad results due to its range of geographical markets and strong casino performance, which yesterday posted revenue growth of 20%.
“We are a bit below where we expect to be because of the results but I’m not really too worried about that really because they tend to balance themselves out over time,” Alexander said.
“I’m pretty pleased with how the year has started. I don’t think we have been in better shape and we are very bullish,” he added.