Growing apart

Does the logic of the Banijay conglomerate still hold?

Mar 16, 2026

Booming Banijay Gaming held back by entertainment torpor.
In +More: Caesars-Tilman Fertitta takeover talks continue.
Markets: The YTD performance of the gaming affiliates.
Product placement: Sparket looks to crowdsource the predictions truth.

Hard Rock Bet is growing – we know you know! And we want to bring in some more maestros to make beautiful music in our Sportsbook. You need to be among the very best in the industry to be considered for these roles. Are you up to it?

Betting on a break-up

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly: Banijay is still projecting its conglomerate figuration as a core strength, with CEO Marco Bassetti talking up the company’s “diversification strategy” during its recent Q4 earnings call.

The numbers somewhat back this up: group FY adj. EBITDA for the year was up 8.6% to €961m.
But there are questions over diversification turning into divergence, and the distinctly different growth rate trajectories of the media and gaming arms.

Two businesses, one guvnor: The Amsterdam-listed but France-based Banijay is, at heart, a media and entertainment group, with its feet firmly planted in independent TV production.

This was enhanced at the start of this month with the All3Media merger.
That will provide a revenue kick to the entertainment and live arm of the business, which, according to the Q4 earnings, is treading water, with revenues flat in constant currency terms at €3.29bn.

Getting better all the time: But the gaming unit saw revenues climb 10% YoY to €1.59bn, with the sportsbook up 7% to €1.21bn despite being hobbled by unfavorable sports results and higher French gaming taxes.

iCasino rose 17% to €249m and poker was up 37% to €106m, while adj. EBITDA came in up 12% at €425m.
This is all pre-the merger with Tipico, which the analysts at Deutsche Bank suggested will continue the double-digit growth for the gaming business.
Group CEO Francois Riahi said on the earnings call that Tipico would “significantly expand the scale of our gaming activities, reinforcing our leadership in sports betting.”

Add Tip? The October 2025 acquisition of a majority stake in Tipico, the German and Austrian sports-betting leader, was the deal that changed the geometry of Banijay. As covered by E+M when it was announced, this was not a bolt-on deal.

It was a step-change that repositioned Banijay Gaming from a French-centric betting operator to a continental European champion.
On a pro-forma basis, the combined Betclic-Tipico entity will generate roughly €3.5bn in revenue and around €1bn in EBITDA.
The financing – €3.1bn priced in January 2026 – has been completed but the integration will wait until after the World Cup this summer.
But, by the end of 2026, Banijay Gaming will be a substantially different and substantially larger business than the one that sits inside the group today.

Three’s company: Just days before the Q4 results, on March 3, Banijay announced the combination of Banijay Entertainment with All3Media, the RedBird IMI-owned producer behind The Traitors.

The logic of the deal is straightforward: scale, IP depth and streaming penetration.
The combined entity would have generated revenues exceeding €4.4bn and EBITDA of €690m in 2024.

But there is something else worth noting about this deal: Banijay is bringing in a significant external partner on its media and entertainment side at the same moment it is building an increasingly self-contained, highly profitable pan-European gaming operation.

The €796m “cash upstream” that Banijay will receive as part of the deal is not trivial.
It meaningfully reduces group leverage, which will fall post-transaction to a pro-forma 3x by the end of 2026.

The question they won’t quite answer: Banijay insisted this is a story about a diversified entertainment group, with gaming as a hedge against content cycles, content as a brand platform, and live experiences connecting the two.

Riahi spoke at the time of the Tipico deal about wanting to be a “consolidator” in gaming.
The March 26 strategic update, they said, will reflect the group’s “transformation” and provide mid-term financial guidance incorporating both Tipico and All3Media.

Bulging at the seams: But the structural logic of keeping these two businesses under one roof arguably grows harder to sustain the more impressive the gaming operation becomes. Banijay Gaming, post-Tipico, will be one of the four largest online sports-betting and gaming operators in continental Europe.

It will have a leverage ratio well below 1x on its own debt and will throw off free cash flow at a conversion rate that outstrips its media sibling.
It is not obvious that it needs a TV production company as a parent.

I can’t see the logic: Writing at the time of the Tipico announcement, Regulus put the question directly: does the group’s continued ownership of its entertainment and gaming divisions “look like a decreasingly logical conglomerate?”

Deutsche Bank, for its part, prices Banijay at roughly 6x EV/EBITDA and 9x P/E for 2026, a discount that arguably reflects exactly this conglomerate overhang.
Management will not say a split is coming and have actively denied it.
But the All3Media deal looks less like consolidation and more like a first step in a gradual disentanglement.
The gaming business is being built to stand alone. The entertainment business is being restructured around a partnership. The group is, piece by piece, building two separable assets.

Diary date: The March 26 update will not announce a breakup – that much is almost certain. But it will be informative to read between the lines of whatever guidance emerges for the shape of what this company is actually becoming.

Venture capital firm Yolo Investments manages in excess of €500m in capital across 100 exciting fintech, gaming and blockchain companies. The Yolo Investments’ Gaming fund, regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, has taken positions in fast-growth suppliers and operators, including Dabble and Enteractive. Yolo Investments (yolo.io) wants to hear from readers of this newsletter. Get in touch with your pitch, or for a chat about innovative products which can plug into our investment ecosystem.

+More

Weekender: Exclusive talks between Caesars and Tilman Fertitta over a potential $6.5bn takeover continued through the weekend, according to CNBC, which reported that any potential deal will not close until April at the earliest, with completion in 2027.
A family affair: Kjerulf Ainsworth, son of Len Ainsworth and a major shareholder in Ainsworth Game Technology, has launched a fresh bid to increase his stake in the company. He is offering A$1.30 ($0.91) per share to acquire up to 5.5% of outstanding stock, a roughly 23.8% premium to the recent share price. If fully accepted, his holding would rise from about 8.17% to 13.25%.

Puts+Takes

Stamp of approval: The analysts at Stifel pointed out that the CFTC’s detailed guidance on prediction markets spells good news for the largest sports rights and data providers. “While the advisory only ‘recommends’ official data usage, we see the update likely accelerating league engagement, and derivatively the ability for Sportradar and Genius Sports to monetize official league data to exchanges (for settlement) and market-makers (for in-play trading),” the team wrote. See Compliance+More tomorrow for more.

Earnings in brief

Century Casinos reported Q4 revenue of $138m, broadly flat YoY, while adj. EBITDAR rose 13% YoY to $23.9m, reflecting margin improvement despite weather-related revenue pressure late in the quarter. For FY25, revenue was $573m, down 1% YoY, while adj. EBITDAR increased 3% to $105m. The company said performance was supported by stronger results in Missouri and West Virginia properties.

Earnings debrief

MGM Resorts

Glass half full: MGM Resorts CEO Bill Hornbuckle and CFO Jonathan Halkyard took to the stage at a JP Morgan investor forum in Las Vegas late last week, and delivered a session that was notable for the expressions of optimism about what 2026 holds against the backdrop of continued angst over trading and visitation trends.

See this morning’s Earnings Debrief edition (PRO subscribers only).

Markets

Not buying what you’re selling: The immediate 28% share price fall that greeted Genius Sports’ $1.2bn acquisition of the gaming affiliate Legend told its own story about the lack of faith on the part of investors in the company’s strategic messaging.

Even an extraordinary second bite of the cherry a couple of weeks later failed to reassure, leaving the shares down 52% YTD.

Not least of the issues was the valuation multiple of ~8.5x EBITDA. which compares very favorably with the prevailing multiples for the listed gaming affiliates, which were at least three turns lower at 4.5x-5.5x.

Some investors in the gaming affiliate sector picked up on the hint and, in the immediate wake of the Genius/Legend deal, Better Collective started a rally, which has seen the company’s share price rise 27.5% YTD.
More speculative, perhaps, is the near-37% uplift for Catena Media, a shadow of its former self but now a possible target for an acquirer.

Shape shifter: Yet, this is far from being a sector-wide re-rating as is evidenced by the YTD performance of Gambling.com, which is down 23% since the start of the year and is off by 65% on a one-year view.

The company reported its Q4 earnings last week and, despite issuing guidance that was below expectations, the analysts remain supportive.
Specifically, they noted the strategic shift towards data, with Stifel pointing out that data services revenue rose 440% YoY in Q4.
The team also said that “interestingly” the company trailed a new marketing product to be launched within weeks.

Three wishes: On the Q4 call, Gambling.com’s CEO Charles Gillespie said that with prediction markets the “genie’s out of the bottle” and there was “clear demand” for a product that was “here to stay.”

Truist analysts noted from the commentary that Gambling.com would be a “net beneficiary” from predictions.
The team said they would provide a “great opportunity” for the company to further grow its data and trading solutions for more exchanges, liquidity providers and financial institutions.

Core blimey: Similarly, Better Collective CEO Jesper Søgaard said on his company’s Q4 call that predictions, alongside AI, were themes that were “increasingly shaping the industry landscape” and that they were a “natural extension” of the core business.

He added that the product was “expanding our total addressable market and is becoming a clear tailwind despite it being early days.”

Octoplay is now live in Brazil. Arriving just one month after its Michigan debut, this move marks the start of its South American expansion.

Product placement – Sparket

Crowdsourcing the truth: Sparket is an established player in US regulated gaming, working with operators such as Station Casinos and various tribal properties. But co-founder and COO Evan Fisher’s real ambition goes further.

He wants the company to become a reliable data layer for the kind of markets that official sports-data providers simply don’t cover.
“The source of truth concept is really interesting,” Fisher told E+M. “Because at the end of the day, it’s a guy or a girl at the stadium typing stuff in manually off a scout.”
“And it’s big companies that have paid for official data to those sports.”

In a pickle: Sparket’s AI model aggregates data inputs from thousands of users watching an event, then assigns credibility ratings based on track record. Get the last 10 pickleball match outcomes right and your predictions carry more weight.

“They can actually provide data inputs to the system that become more verifiable over time because we’re giving ratings to each person,” Fisher explained.

Rabbit in the headlights: The use case becomes most compelling in what Fisher called the “long tail” of events. This is not just niche sports leagues without data sponsors, but the rapidly expanding universe of non-sporting markets.

The Super Bowl halftime show is the obvious example. There was no official data feed for which song Bad Bunny opened with.
But there were millions of people watching.
“If you can incentivize the crowd to report the outcome of events, and if you have certain people within that ecosystem that have higher ratings because they’ve reported accurately over a period of time, then you can definitively determine the source of truth,” said Fisher.

Cardi-oh-graph: He was also clear about what the system does not solve. The Polymarket furore over whether Cardi B actually ‘performed’ at the Super Bowl halftime show is the kind of ambiguity that crowdsourced data alone cannot resolve.

“It doesn’t necessarily solve that,” Fisher acknowledged. “But you get inputs from thousands of people reporting their opinions on it, and you can come to more of a consensus rather than one person or one official data [provider] resolving that.”
Guardrails, manual reviews and market wording, he said, remain essential.

Chain gang: For transparency, the first version of Sparket’s application is built on the blockchain, though Fisher is careful not to let that overshadow the product. “We don’t want to sound like we’re launching a token or a coin,” he said.

“But the good part about the blockchain is that everything’s super transparent.”
Users and operators can see all predictions made and all data provided, creating an auditable record that traditional monitoring cannot match.

Fat tail: Sparket already generates 20,000 markets per month, covering reality TV, pop culture and alternative sports leagues, and has over a million data points to train its model.

Fisher’s plan is to use those markets as its own proving ground before packaging the data for sale to sportsbook operators and third-party data providers.
The company filed its underlying patent back in 2020 and spent five years securing it.
“Once that hit, then we really started working on it in earnest,” he said.
The long tail, as Fisher sees it, isn’t just getting longer. It’s getting fatter. And that, he argued, demands a fundamentally different approach to data.

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