About this app
What is Colossal Vikings?
Peru’s regulated market went live in February 2024 and has since attracted a host of international operators, establishing a competitive market that includes legacy domestic operators such as market leader Apuesta Total.
According to Jennyfer Escobar, Stake’s Peru country manager, Peru is one of the most competitive in Latin America. “In the early stages, competition was largely driven by marketing investment, including advertising, sponsorships etc,” Escobar tells iGB. “Today, product quality, platform performance and the overall user experience are becoming much stronger differentiators.
“Players are more informed, have higher expectations and will switch brands if those expectations aren’t met.”
How to play Colossal Vikings
“Our hope is that in the next few months there will be a window of opportunity where the market will be hotter and [it’s] a more interest rate friendly environment where we can go raise the money and then just put it in an escrow account,” Scheinthal said at the time.
That window Scheinthal had hoped for seems to be moving further away. Caesars’ proxy filing showed that even during negotiations in the spring, Fertitta refused to go above its $31-per-share offer “due to higher financing costs and increased macroeconomic risks”. From the end of 2025 to late April of this year, higher borrowing costs had resulted in “approximately $40 million per year in additional costs from when the process started”, the filing said.
Diller, for his part, lodged an all-cash, $48.30-per-share offer for MGM days after the Caesars deal broke. People Inc. finished Q2 with $1.1 billion in cash, but between the 74% of shares it would acquire, as well as MGM’s long-term debt of over $6 billion, some level of financing would be required. MGM appointed an independent committee to review the bid but has said nothing since.
How to play Colossal Vikings
Once the deal is completed, current Lottomatica shareholders are expected to own around 67.5% of the share capital, with Cirsa’s shareholders owning the remaining 32.5%.
Cirsa shareholders will receive 0.668 newly issued Lottomatica shares for each of their shares in Cirsa.
Meanwhile Blackstone, Cirsa’s largest shareholder, is expected to become the largest shareholder of the combined company, maintaining around 24% of the share capital.
