Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment
PartyGaming's best known brand
PartyGaming plc is an online gambling company, best known for its online poker room PartyPoker. It is headquartered in Gibraltar and quoted on the London Stock Exchange. PartyPoker is the biggest poker website by far, with appoximately a 50 to 55% market share. The company also operates the PartyBingo and Starluck Casino brands. Its games are run on equipment located in Gibraltar and Canada on the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory.
PartyGaming (formerly known as iGlobalmedia) was founded in 1997 by Ruth Parasol, and its flagship site, PartyPoker.com, launched in 2001. Its other primary shareholders are chief programmer Anurag Dikshit, marketing director Vikrant Bhargava, who joined the company in 1998 and 1999 respectively, and Russ DeLeon (Parasol's husband). Due to concerns about the legality of online gambling in the United States, the company is incorporated in Gibraltar and has no assets in the United States. Nonetheless, U.S. consumers provide around 90% of PartyGaming's revenues.
In June 2005, some of the top shareholders of PartyGaming plc sold 23% of the company's stock in an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange. The initial offer price of 116p valued the company at £4.64 billion ($8.46 billion). Within a week the value of the shares rose to make the value of the company exceed ten billion dollars. It is expected to join the FTSE 100 Index at the next quarterly reshuffle in September. Profits for 2004 were $371 million.
During the IPO, no new shares of PartyGaming were issued, and the company did not receive any additional capital as a result. Rather, shares merely changed hands with the primary shareholders reducing their shares.