Catena Media makes final payment in ASAP Italia deal

Affiliate marketing company Catena Media has made the final payment as part of its purchase of ASAP Italia.

As part of the deal, agreed in 2018, Catena paid an up-front fee of €12.5m (£10.9m/$14.5m in June 2018) plus a €3.5m deferred cash consideration.

The agreement also included an earn-out provision, of which half may be paid in shares and the remainder in cash, that would be based on revenue performance, with a maximum possible payment of €6m.

However, barely a month after the deal was announced that the Italian authorities unveiled their plans to put a halt to all advertising and marketing of gambling within the country, including affiliate marketing.

In its first quarter results, Catena suggested that odds comparison sites such as ASAP Italia's Superscommesse.it  “are not considered advertising” provided they “comply with the principles of self-restraint, truthfulness and transparency”.

In the end, this payment came to €2.1m (£1.9m/$2.4m in 2019). Catena’s board opted to pay half of this via an issue of 183,672 shares, which cannot be sold for six months. The shares were priced at SEK 58.9 (£4.74/€5.43/$5.99) each.

In August, Catena announced that it had fallen short of its projected revenues for the second quarter of 2019, blaming tighter regulations in the UK and France as well as a lack of improvement in the newly regulated Swedish market for its struggles during the period.