LISTED firm PhilWeb Corp. and Palmary Corp. on Monday said it signed a cooperation agreement to jointly develop their electronic bingo or e-bingo businesses starting this month.
Palmary also acquired a minority interest in PhilWeb.
PhilWeb currently operates six e-bingo outlets while the Palmary group operates 16 outlets. Palmary Group is also an accredited supplier of e-bingo machines in the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.’s network of over 300 e-bingo outlets with over 30,000 e-bingo terminals.
“We are very excited about our future in the e-bingo business in cooperation with the Palmary Group,” said Gregorio Ma. Araneta III, PhilWeb chairman.
“When combined with our growing e-Games business, we now have an expanding, two-fold footprint in the whole electronic gaming sector,” he said.
PhilWeb is currently the service provider to 67 e-Games outlets and, together with the Palmary Group, would comanage 22 e-bingo outlets.
“I remain deeply committed to getting PhilWeb back to its former profitability levels, during which times we were able to pay out high dividends to stockholders and generate significant share-price increases, as well. We are also committed to our role in consistently increasing the revenues of Pagcor, which we have done for over 13 years,” he said.
Palmary also signed a share-purchase agreement to acquire 97.33 million shares of PhilWeb, representing 6.78 percent of the company. It did not state the price of the acquisition.
“I welcome the Palmary Group’s investment in our company, a great sign of faith in the positive developments we have attained in the past year. I believe this investment will result in positive gains for both over the next few years,” Araneta said.
PhilWeb is an accredited service provider to Pagcor for its network of electronic gaming outlets. It also has a wholly owned subsidiary, BigGame Inc., which has Pagcor gaming licenses for its e-games outlets.
Palmary is an operator of electronic bingo outlets and an accredited e-bingo machine supplier to Pagcor, for its network of electronic bingo outlets.