Online casino company gears up for a public listing

Swedish investment company Mr Green & Co AB, which owns the growing Malta-based online casino Mr Green, has announced that it has secured a public listing on Sweden’s AktieTorget exchange.

The company claims that since its launch in 2008, Mr Green has posted annual growth in excess of 70 percent and a game win for 2012 of about SEK 319 million.

The corresponding figure for the first quarter of 2013 was SEK 109 million.

Trading in the shares will start on today (Friday, 28 June on the ticker: MRG. The share has a healthy ownership spread following the distribution to its own shareholders by the then major shareholder, the risk capital company Transferator AB, of its entire holding in Mr Green & Co.

Mr Green was founded in 2008 by the three childhood friends: Fredrik Sidfalk, Henrik Bergquist and Mikael Pawlo .

The idea was to create an online casino with a completely new concept – to provide an ambience equivalent to Monte Carlo through graphic design, creating an environment and a brand previously unseen in the gaming world. Today, Mr Green can lay claim to being one of the most rapidly growing companies in the industry and has approximately 130 employees.

“We hope the listing on AktieTorget will enable investors to appreciate Mr Green just as much as our gamers do,” said Mikael Pawlo, CEO of Mr Green & Co. “We wanted to provide gamers with a period of enjoyable entertainment using a completely new concept, but we could never have imagined how well received Mr Green would actually be.”

For the last financial year, 2012, Mr Green reported EBITDA of SEK 47 million. For the first quarter of 2013, the company posted a pro forma EBITDA of SEK 24.6 million. The company’s policy is to distribute up to 50 percent of the free cash flow to shareholders.

The company uses a variety of tier one softwares, offering over 200 games to its around 660,000 registered players through online and mobile channels.

The number of shareholders in Mr Green currently amounts to about 800. Major shareholders include founders Fredrik Sidfalk (17.3 percent) and Henrik Bergquist (18.8 percent), Hans Fajerson (18.5 percent) and Mikael Pawlo (5.6 percent).

Among other achievements, Mr Green has been the highest ranked online casino for five years in the Swedish magazine Internetworld’s ranking of Sweden’s top 100 sites.

The following companies are wholly owned by Mr Green & Co AB:

* Green Gaming Group plc, Malta, which owns the Malta-based online casino Mr Green. The casino is licensed by the Lotteries and Gaming Authority of Malta.

* Mr Green & Co Technology AB, a provider of technical services and

* Iacta Marketing AB, which provides marketing services for online gaming.