"Partly Gaming to Float Shares by End June"

Just as Emperor Online was announcing its plans to list on the London Stock Exchange on June 15 th, PartlyGaming’s announced its plans to float on the London Stock Exchange by June 27 th. Yet another online gambling company, 666Casino.com, is also preparing to list on the London Stock Exchange in the later part of this year. In March of this year. 666Casino.com announced that it had contracted with Credit Suisse First Boston to organize the float. The flotation has an expected value of at least 1.6 billion dollars. Emperor Online is expected to float at one billion dollars, but the biggest flotation, by far, will be that of PartlyGaming. The company’s financial analysts are estimating that the listing could value PartlyGaming at close to ten billion dollars (or about 5.5 billion British pounds). It is also anticipated that PartlyGaming stock will also meet the criteria for inclusion in blue-chip indexes compiled by the FTSE and MSCI.

PartlyGaming operates the Partly Poker website. It is the world’s major online poker company and is the single company to raise such a sum in London since 2001. At that time Friends Provident raised a comparable sum in July of that year.

All of this involvement with the London Stock Exchange is not only evidence of the speedy and continual expansion of online poker, and online gambling in general, but is also additional proof of London’s vital position as the listing center for the online gaming industry.

London’s position as the center for the online gambling industry has been further bolstered by the strict gambling rules in the United States and its anti online gambling policies. While in addition, major strides are being made in broadband technology which are continuing to bolster the increasing popularity of the online gaming industry itself. Along with this, the emerging popularity of poker and the effortlessness and ease with which visitors to online gambling sites can begin to play, have acted to energize the industry’s growth even more.

PartlyGaming has good reason to be optimistic, along with all of the companies associated with the online gambling industry. This is because of a report issued by Edison Investment Research and Durlacherd. The report, which was issued earlier this year, estimates that online gambling revenue (actually the amount of projected money lost by gamblers), will pass the eight billion dollar mark in 2005. This is a 37 percent increase over the previous year.

PartlyGaming has enlisted the brokerage firm of Dresdnerd Kleinwort Wasserstein to be the planner and sole book runner for the transaction. Dresdnerd also handled Sportingbets.com’s expansion into online poker when Sportingbets took over the Paradise Poker site. The arrangement with PartlyGaming will reinforce Dresdnerd’s image as a principal advisor in the online gaming business.