Hatchling
Hacksaw Gaming IPO could kickstart moribund new listings market
Nasdaq Stockholm listing imminent for games and tech supplier.
Robinhood chief broker hints at prediction markets platform build.
Puts & takes: Citizens lowers DraftKings and Flutter.
Sector watch: the new craze for crypto treasuries.
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Signs of life
A rarity: iCasino games provider and tech supplier Hacksaw Gaming has been conducting meetings with institutional investors, as it prepares the ground for a listing on the Nasdaq Stockholm main market within the month.
The financial details of the listing have not been disclosed nor the guide price. The process will be run by joint bookrunners Jefferies, Citi and Carnegie.
Highs and lows: This latest attempt at a gaming-related float comes after 2024 saw just one new sector listing, with High Roller Technologies managing to get a float away in New York in October. See below for the latest news from the company.
That aside, there was also a near miss last year when Games Global pulled its US IPO this time last year blaming “current market conditions.”
Shooting star: Hacksaw has enjoyed a meteoric rise with yearly revenue rising over 100% in each of the past two years to €137m in 2024, while in Q125 revenues were up 71% to €45m. EBITDA has risen in tandem to €117m in 2024 and €38m in Q125 while margins have been steady at ~85%.
The Maltese-headquartered company said an IPO was a “logical and important step.”
Find me a suit: Hacksaw’s CEO is Christoffer Källberg, who has only been with the company since January when he joined from Carnegie. The chair is Patrick Svensk, who has been in situ since April last year and is the CEO of podcast tech supplier PodX.
The CEO in Malta is Marcus Cordes, who has been with the company since it started in 2018.
Who’s selling? The press release said the shares on offer as part of the listing would be sold by a combination of existing shareholders, including founders, board members and the management team.
These include current 25% shareholder Fractional Holding and board member Frédéric Herz who controls 10%.
Bland ambition: The company said its aim once listed would be to hand at least 75% of net profits to investors via dividends and share buybacks, ambitions that Regulus branded as “rather unambitious.”
“‘Don’t worry about approaching maturity, just look at the moolah’ is not a strategy the online gambling sector needs any more of,” the team added.
Times tables: The lack of an aggressive go-forward strategy might also crimp the multiple. IPOs often attract an initial rating of up to 15x or even 20x prevailing EBITDA, which would give Hacksaw a valuation at float of anywhere between €1.75bn and €2.34bn.
Such valuations might depend on where Hacksaw makes its money. Regulus pointed out Hacksaw has the usual mixture of point-of-supply and point-of-consumption licenses.
The company previously paid a reduced fine from the Swedish authorities over supplying games to Swedish-facing black market operators.
Saw point: Regulus said if Hacksaw’s growth was "overwhelmingly" from regulated markets, this would be “high quality” and would be “more buzzing than hacking.”
However, if black and dark gray markets have been “allowed to seep into the revenue stream, then the transition to visibility might be a little more painful.”
More to come? Further potential floats that could take place this year include the Blackstone-owned Cirsa via a listing in Madrid or the similarly private equity-owned Tipico, this time owned by CVC, and Belgium-based Gaming1, owned by Ardent.
On a roller
Finnish line: The iCasino operator High Roller said it expects "significantly" reduced losses in Q2 from a “strong and consistent” improvement in KPIs across the whole business, most notably in Finland. It added that GGR in April and May came in at $2.5m and $2.75m respectively.
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LDN: Wynn Resorts has completed the acquisition of Aspinall’s casino in Mayfair, London, following approval from the Gambling Commission and has confirmed it has rebranded the property as Wynn Mayfair. Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings said the deal gave the company a presence in a “global gateway city” and “conduit” for guests to visit its resorts, in particular Al Marjan Island in the UAE.
BetMakers Technology has received a further A$12.5m ($8.1m) in financing from investors, including Tekkorp, to pay down its remaining A$4.3m of debt, with the remainder expected to be used to pay for the acquisition announced earlier this week of Nevada-based pari-mutual provider the Las Vegas Dissemination Company.
Read across
Playing both sides: Play’n GO defended itself against evidence that some of its most popular games are available on black market sites targeting the Netherlands and Germany. In Compliance+More on Tuesday.
Volte-face: Also in Tuesday’s C+M, the Isle of Man said it has “limited appetite” for doing business with online gaming entities where there is ownership of control from either East or Southeast Asia, marking an about turn on years of dealing with Asia-focused bookmakers.
+More careers
Peter Ekmark has stepped down as CEO at PlayStar and been replaced by Fredrik Liljewall, who was previously co-chair. Ekmark had been in post since September 2023. Matej Nemec is the new VP, commercial partnerships at Superbet. Bragg Gaming has appointed Scott Milford as EVP of group content.
Digital Marketing Manager – Lisbon
Customer Service Director – San José
Director of Licensing – Alderney
Building permit
To build a home: Robinhood is “looking at everything” when it comes to its prediction market offering, including potentially building its own platform, according to the company’s chief brokerage officer Steve Quirk.
As it stands, Robinhood takes its prediction markets offering from Kalshi and ForecastX.
Who’s trading who? Quirk was keen to stress that what Robinhood was attracted to with prediction markets was it meant the company was “aligned” with its customers. In sports, he noted, it meant “you are trading with you.”
“We’re not incentivized by you losing, which is not what happens in other models,” he claimed.
“To the extent we can maintain that model and still have an avenue to do more of it on our own, we’ll explore that,” he added.
Retirement plans: Recall, Quirk said at another investor conference late last month that Robinhood believed prediction markets were a good product fit for retirement fund offerings as part of a full suite of financial offerings.
Puts & takes
Known unknowns
The twilight zone: The kerfuffle in Illinois and the possibility of Ohio following suit with equally punishing tax hikes has forced Citizens to confront the darkness beyond. Or, more prosaically, “bake in assumptions around the unknown,” i.e. future tax rises, in order to set reasonable expectations.
Specifically, the analysts are adjusting their estimates for DraftKings and Flutter.
The team estimated each will be hit with an incremental $200m of extra taxes in 2026 and a further $125m more in 2027.
The analysts added that they “assume” companies will make changes to the business model, including the ability to offset ~50% of the taxes through mitigation efforts, though not in Illinois.
Recall, earlier this week Deutsche Bank said the likelihood operators would be able to mitigate the upcoming Illinois tax hike by way of the reduction of promo expenses was unlikely.
Dominos, dancing: Noting the structure of the Illinois tax hike was "designed two years in a row to hurt the top two companies,” Citizens argued this did not signal the beginning of a domino effect.
Buy, curious: But they noted investors were “curious” on how the two companies would respond, with mixed feelings on display over the potentials for an upfront surcharge or masking the impact by passing it off to the consumer.
They also said they expected to see “more discrete ways to avoid taxes” through incremental products such as predictions, fantasy P2P and iLottery.
“Fanatics has an interesting strategy, offering the ability to use bonus money (FanCash) to buy profit boosts and other options within the app,” the team added.
The REITs
VICI Properties: The quality and value of high-end Las Vegas Strip casino assets is something investors are well aware of, but by comparison their less flashy regional casino cousins are left unloved, suggested CBRE.
Gaming & Leisure Properties: Having met with management, Truist reported that GLP is “closely monitoring” the proxy fight between Penn and activist investor HG Vora. The analysts noted GLP is insistent that it would not look to “split up” any of its master leases in the event of a potential acquisition of Penn. “Given the health of the land based business, the current master lease is thought to be in the best interests of GLPI shareholders,” the analysts added.
Aristocrat: The social casino unit, now called Product Madness, is taking market share, according to Jefferies, who pointed to data from Sensor Tower that showed Aristocrat’s revenue via Android/iOS platforms up 4% in May vs. an equal and opposite overall market decline of 4%. The team suggested the competitive pressure from sweepstakes gaming may have declined in recent months due to the recent regulatory discussions.
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.
Connections
The big deal: Global sailing competition SailGP has entered the sports-betting arena via official partnerships with DraftKings in the US and bet365 globally, as part of efforts to boost fan engagement and grow its audience. The deal was announced ahead of the league’s New York event this weekend.
High Roller will be partnering with Playtech for the launch of operations in Ontario later this year. Caesars Entertainment and Light & Wonder have collaborated over the launch of an exclusive iCasino title called, deep breath, ‘Ultimate Fire Link Cash Falls by the Bay’. BGaming’s online casino games are now live on Betcris’ iCasino platform across LatAm. Altenar has extended its sports-betting backend agreement with Starcasino in the Netherlands. The brand has also added iCasino games from Air Dice to its platform.
Affiliate provider BetAndYou has launched a new online casino brand, CasinoAndYou, in Turkey, Portugal and Uzbekistan under a Curaçao license. UK-facing sports-betting operator kwiff has secured a two-year sponsorship deal with Scottish football club Motherwell from next season. Aristocrat Interactive will provide its iLottery products to the Michigan Lottery under a six-year agreement from July 2026. Xtremepush will offer its omni-channel CRM platform to IGT’s PlaySports’ operator partners.
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Sector watch – treasury strategies
The good, the bad and the indecipherable: Cryptocurrency treasury strategies – that is, companies who declare their main, sometimes sole purpose, is to buy chunks of crypto, sit on it and watch it accumulate – are all the rage.
Flakey: Following on the coattails of Michael Saylor’s Strategy (nee, MicroStrategy), the analysts at Compass Point suggested at least 99 companies have declared similar approaches to Bitcoin and its crypto brethren.
Sharp tack: One such as SharpLink, formerly a gaming affiliate minnow with a market cap in the single millions of dollars but now – after a cash raise involving Consensys and a host of crypto investment VCs – a $3.52bn market cap punt on an Ethereum treasury strategy.
Bandwagon: Understandably, given the numbers of companies now chasing down similar strategies, Compass Point suggested there is a “risk of oversaturation."
“If the number of these vehicles accelerates further, this could eventually drive crypto’s next boom/bust cycle if NAV premiums compress and buying pressure fades,” they added.
“Irresponsible use of leverage by some companies could also lead to forced selling in a bear market.”
The meme generation: Any oversaturation would come via either reverse takeovers or SPACs, according to the analysts, who said they are also concerned about the “proliferation” of companies seeking to differentiate themselves by acquiring niche assets such as meme coins.
“While memecoin volatility can provide enticing returns over short periods, most memecoins underperform after the first 3-6 months of their initial launch,” the team cautioned.
They added that memecoins often peak as they get listed on major exchanges and suggested the 90%+ drawdowns seen previously could “ harm investors if public companies adopt these tokens in their treasuries.”
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