BARCELONA, Spain - Private Media Group Inc. announced Thursday it has completed the acquisition of VOD and e-commerce company GameLink.
Announced in a letter of intent last November, the all-stock deal is one of the adult industry's biggest recent buy-outs. The acquisition of Gamelink continues the Private's ongoing effort to expand its business into new media platforms.
According to a company press release, Private is now launching a new online media division to oversee international sales and marketing operations in the U.S. and Europe. GameLink founder Ilan Bunimovitz will remain as executive vice-president of the division.
"In 2008, Private focused its business on new-media platform distribution with customized targeted content offerings with great success," said COO Peter Cohen. "The addition of GameLink's successful VOD portal, along with its state of the art development capabilities for platform design, interactive functionality, and user profiling, will greatly enhance our global business model and ability to implement our online initiatives more timely and efficient manner".
Private's future plans include a global roll-out of the GameLink VOD portal, a re-launch of Private's consumer site, expanded international content licensing deals, and increased off-portal mobile content delivery.
GameLink founder Ilan Bunimovitz is looking forward to increased business opportunities arising from the deal.
"This deal creates a much stronger business model," he said. "It allows us to combine GameLink's expertise in distributing rich media content with Private's strong brand presence and broad reach into international online markets and emerging media platforms such as IPTV and mobile. The combined entity will offer more content in more media formats, localized for more countries. In addition, we will extend our platform to other adult and mainstream content providers and resellers. This means that customers, affiliates, and content providers now have a one-stop digital aggregation and distribution solution."
The acquisition agreement provides for the issuance of 8,534,309 unregistered shares of Private common stock to the owners of GameLink and related companies, and up to an additional 4,597,397 shares of Private common stock based on earn-out targets.
The combined revenue of the two companies for the nine months ending Sept. 30, 2008, was reported at $35.3 million. Private alone reported $22.7 million in earnings for the same period.
For more about the acquisition, visit Private's corporate site.
