The court has recently sided with Flutter Entertainment in its dispute with Fox Corporation over the valuation of FanDuel.
Having first been initialized by Fox Corporation over one and a half years ago, the arbitration was greenlit over a disagreement on the terms of a potential purchase agreement of nearly 19% of FanDuel’s shares.
The media company was offered an option to acquire a stake in FanDuel, as they are strategic partners of Flutter Entertainment. The option was based on a total valuation of 20 billion dollars, which is where Fox Corporation had some differing opinions.
The legal process was initiated in April of 2021 when the media company began to question the valuation of FanDuel. Their doubts were started by Flutter’s acquisition of their remaining over 37% share in the operator that was not owned by them, as they were chasing an outright ownership of FanDuel.
Following the acquisition, which was valued at 4 billion dollars, the media company disputed that the operator was worth an approximate 11 billion dollars, which would mean that their option of buying 18.6% of the company would cost them just about 2 billion dollars. Fox’s numbers were just about half of the ones in the original terms, making the two companies get into an arbitration.
Fairly recently, however, the court has decided to side with Flutter, agreeing on FanDuel’s valuation of 20 billion dollars as of the end of 2021. That makes the media corporation’s purchasing option worth about 4.1 billion dollars at the time of writing.
This latest ruling has verified our position on the matter and has reinstated our confidence in the valuation of FanDuel. It provided much needed certainty on the purchase price of FanDuel for our partner, if they decide to exercise their option.
remarked the chief executive officer of Flutter, Peter Jackson, commenting on the result of the dispute.
