Light & Wonder Monday announced the completion of a previously announced acquisition for the approximately 17% outstanding equity interest in SciPlay Corporation that it did not previously own. The company acquired the outstanding equity for $22.95 per share in cash.
Light & Wonder first submitted a proposal to acquire the stock in May 2023 and entered a definitive agreement for the purchase in August. That transaction was approved by Light & Wonder’s board of directors.
“Fully integrating SciPlay with Light & Wonder creates a more streamlined organization with the financial strength to accelerate our cross-platform strategy and deliver enhanced shareholder returns,” said Light & Wonder President and CEO Matt Wilson in a statement. “SciPlay continues to achieve record-setting results and market outperformance, and we are confident that together, we will build on their considerable momentum. As one company, we will drive improved collaboration between our talented teams to build and deploy the most engaging games across our digital and land-based platforms and create a more seamless, best-in-class player experience.”
SciPlay will operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Light & Wonder. SciPlay common stock will no longer be publicly traded on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
In August, Wilson stated that the acquisition of SciPlay would accelerate Light & Wonder’s cross-platform strategy by “creating an even stronger and more efficient platform for growth.”
Since the company rebranded as Light & Wonder from Scientific Games in April 2022, it has shed in sports betting and lottery businesses and focused on its gaming assets: land-based gaming, social casino, and igaming products.
At the recent Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, Wilson said it was necessary to reconfigure Light & Wonder’s “Frankenstein collection of assets.”
We were trying to be a huge amount of things to a lot of different end markets,” Wilson said at G2E. “We’d been put through a huge amount of leverage and debts, and we had some discussion to make about how we pivoted the company and focus it around some really streamlined core competencies.”
