Better Collective has completed the £40m (€44m) acquisition of Atemi Group, a global igaming lead generation company specialising in paid media and social media advertising.
Lauded as a “major strategic move” that presents “significant synergistic opportunities,” Atemi has been branching out from its historic focus on igaming traffic acquisition and has more recently focused on building and investing in sports betting comparison platforms.
For 2020, the firm is on course to send more than 180,000 new depositing customers to their partners, and has set a revenue target of approximately €40m and operational earnings in the region of €8m. In 2019, Atemi generated revenues of €33m with an organic growth of 70 per cent year-on-year.
Richard Skelhorn, founder of Atemi Group, stated: “We built a very successful gaming affiliate business over the past five years at Atemi. All credit goes to the amazing team and now we are thrilled to be joining Better Collective.
“Atemi and Better Collective are both market leaders in their respective areas, and the combination of the two companies, creates a very strong force in gaming affiliation. I am certain this will take us to the next level.”
The purchase price will see £32.5m paid upfront at closing in a combination of £27.8m in cash and £4.7m in Better Collective shares from the treasury shares holding. The remaining £7.5m will be paid in equal quarterly deferred payments until the end of 2021.
The purchase, says Better Collective, provides additional channels of traffic sourcing high intent customers at a large scale, as well as the opportunity of scaling PPC activities into additional markets and to further invest in sports betting opportunities.
Jesper Søgaard, CEO of Better Collective, explained: “This acquisition is a very important step for us to reach our strategic target of becoming the leading sports betting aggregator in the world.
“Atemi Group has been on an impressive growth journey since the company was founded in 2015, and has reached the large scale it takes to be competitive and profitable within paid media. We see many opportunities for expansion into new markets and for harvesting synergistic effects between our assets and competences.
“The acquisition will immediately bring Better Collective in the absolute leading position when in comes to customer acquisition for the online operators, with an estimated annual NDC level of of more than 600.000, and from a financial perspective Better Collective will take a leap of having proforma annual revenue of estimated more than €120m with high operational earnings and cash flow.”
