Monday morning, Bally’s Corp. Chairman Sooyung Kim’s Standard General company, the largest single shareholder in Bally’s, issued an offer to take the company private. The offer is priced at $15 per share. Standard General already holds 23 percent of Bally’s stock.
Bally’s opened trading at $10.55 per share, then jumped to $13.35 a share, finally closing at $13.64, up 29 percent for the day.
Although Kim’s offer was slightly above his own $14-per-share price target for the stock, Truist Securities analyst Barry Jonas wrote that he had questions about the proposed deal. Standard General made a previous buyout offer for Bally’s, priced at $38 a share, on January 25, 2022.
Jonas opined that “the prospects of the company have changed meaningfully since Standard General’s January 2022 offer.” Such changes included Bally’s not having created a “formidable” presence in North American online gambling and sports betting. Others were the company’s Chicago casino project, awarded in May 2022, a change in management, and the Oakland Athletics’s plan to build a baseball stadium on the site of the Tropicana Las Vegas, which will close April 2, with demolition expected soon to follow.
The analyst offered no opinion as to how these factors would impact the Standard General transaction, should it go forward. The offer had not been formally announced by Bally’s at press time, having been disclosed through an SEC filing.
