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Alton Towers for Sale?

They ultimately took on a bit more than they could chew and expanded way too much. A massive mistake.

Also a few of the huge investments they made into brand new Legoland parks have flopped massively. 3 of them are meant to be complete ghost towns 95% of the time so must be losing so much money per year.

Its a long way back for them now.
 
Benjsh said:
They ultimately took on a bit more than they could chew and expanded way too much. A massive mistake.

Also a few of the huge investments they made into brand new Legoland parks have flopped massively. 3 of them are meant to be complete ghost towns 95% of the time so must be losing so much money per year.

Its a long way back for them now.
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How so? The 3 under construction parks are meant to open in 2025*, 2027 and 2028 respectively.

Shanghai opened in July this year.

Legoland Sichuan was supposed to open in 2023 and was pushed back to 2025 and to be fair still has no announced date yet.
 
The three that are not busy as expected are Korea, New York and Dubai. However they didn’t pay to build Dubai and are just paid to operator it, so Dubai isn’t a financial strain on the company.
 
Maelstrom said:
The three that are not busy as expected are Korea, New York and Dubai. However they didn’t pay to build Dubai and are just paid to operator it, so Dubai isn’t a financial strain on the company.
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Looking at the locations for New York and Korea, it's no real surprise that they might not be a massive draw. Not middle of nowhere places but don't particularly look that great either.
 
With Dubai, I also get the impression that none of the parks in that area are particularly busy, so it’s not especially unusual that Legoland isn’t overly busy.
 
These vloggers are allowed to have their opinion on what Merlin have done wrong (and right) in their ownership of Towers, and speculate on what the future means, but they’re no more qualified or knowledgable about the matter than your average theme park enthusiast and therefore you can save yourself a lot of time by not watching these videos.

They may be ‘experts’ or rollercoasters, but being an expert on corporate financing and the like they are not.
 
I wonder what the value of somewhere like Towers would be? Also do we know how much Merlin sold the actual land for all the way back when, was that public information?
 
Blackrock said:
I wonder what the value of somewhere like Towers would be? Also do we know how much Merlin sold the actual land for all the way back when, was that public information?
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They sold the land for Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Madame Tussaud’s London and Warwick Castle for £622 million back in 2007. The value of each park’s land was not released, just the total of them all.

www.blackstone.com

Merlin and Prestbury - Sale and Lease Back Transaction - Blackstone

Press releases, portfolio company news, and timely updates on our business.
www.blackstone.com www.blackstone.com
 
Mick said:
They may be ‘experts’ or rollercoasters, but being an expert on corporate financing and the like they are not.
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And therein lies the problem. A lot of people will take what they say at face value and assume they know what they are talking about. A lot of Shaun’s content will receive lots of comments ain’t the lines of “you should run Towers, Shaun, you’d do a great job of it!”

In reality, chances are he would do a far worse job than Merlin are. As enthusiasts, we wouldn’t be able to run a park because what we want would bankrupt us.
 
AT86 said:
It basically meant they could fund the purchase of the Tussaud’s Group without having to use debt.
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Which I guess made sense at the time but considering they’ve now got a lot of debt albeit serviceable for the time being maybe perhaps it was slightly shortsighted.

But would they have been able to grow at the rate they have if they hadn’t done that.
 
Blackrock said:
Which I guess made sense at the time but considering they’ve now got a lot of debt albeit serviceable for the time being maybe perhaps it was slightly shortsighted.

But would they have been able to grow at the rate they have if they hadn’t done that.
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The vast majority of the debt that they're in now is a result of the second leveraged buyout, taking it back into private ownership in 2019, from being publicly floated.

The original intention was to float the company, to give the original investors an exit and return on their initial investments.

The Smiler crash, the UK terror incidents and shocking 2017 weather were responsible for an absolute tanking in Merlin's share price and it never truly recovered. Additionally, the founding partners of Merlin Private 2.0 believed that the company required significant, long-term investment that was better managed away from the short-term scrutiny of the public stock market.

Such investments often take years to generate returns, which can be challenging to manage when beholden to the quarterly reporting demands of public shareholders. They didn't expect to be beholden to bloggers during closed season, however.
 
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