A big piece of theme park business news popped up yesterday, as Bloomberg reported SeaWorld has made a $3.4 billion offer to buy the Cedar Fair park chain. Cedar Fair confirmed in a statement that SeaWorld had made an unsolicited offer.
Manta at SeaWorld, Orlando.
Theme park fans know SeaWorld as the owner the Busch Gardens parks and Sesame place in addition to the SeaWorld parks. Cedar Fair of course owns Cedar Point, but also parks throughout the country like Knott’s Berry Farm in Southern California, Carowinds in North Carolina, and Canada’s Wonderland near Toronto, Canada, as well as the Schlitterbahn water parks. SeaWorld has a pretty limited geographic presence, so the takeover makes sense as a way to greatly expand their reach.
Fury 325 at Carowinds, one of the parks owned by Cedar Fair.
SeaWorld offered $60/share cash to buy Cedar Fair – which had been priced at about $50/share before the news broke. That probably won’t be enough for a takeover, but some experts think it makes sense for some consolidation of park chains to happen, and that SeaWorld could afford a higher price.
This isn’t the first takeover attempt in recent years. In 2019 Six Flags tried to take over Cedar Fair, and got turned down. And there were rumors that Merlin, the UK based comapny that owns Legoland, tried to buy SeaWorld in 2017. We’ll see how this one pans out, but if it does there will probably be a lot of back and forth first.
I hope they get turned down. I like seaworld but I also prefer cedar fair right where it is. If they accepted it would be massive.