So basically saying this is a playing the jungle drums without any real outcome..?
Well this is a complicated topic and obviously I don't have internal information, that's why I'm comfortable speculating about this…
To answer your question, no they are not just »playing the jungle drums« owners of Panini actually (in my opinion) want out of the company (also the procedure gets costly and if there is not outcome company just records expenses and no reward). The thing is that Panini owners are not stupid and they know that if they want to get the most money they have to sell when the results are the best and that is after the World Cup – Even collectors know that if they want to sell old collections for more money they have to do it in the year of the World Cup
And also sometimes sellers list items at ridiculously high prices and most of the time those items will not get sold, but you only need one guy to overpay, and this is what Panini’s owners are hopping that will happen.
The problem Panini’s owners have is that the profit of the company is very volatile and when the World Cup comes they make as much money in 1 year as they then do in almost 3 years and that is why now is the time to sell, same as it was in 2014 and if not successful now then 2022 will be another opportunity to try again…
Panini is worth a lot of money, but (in my opinion) it’s not worth one billion Euros because World Cup is not every year and granted they have the license for next UEFA Euro and FIFA World Cup and now Premier League, etc., but they are not very successful with new digital stuff, so there are risks out there…
About Topps and why the odds that Topps will be the one that buys Panini are very low is even a more complicated story, but for whoever is interested let’s just say that if Topps and Panini merge what this article is describing and was not a problem before might actually become a problem…
https://www.euractiv.com/section/competition/news/football-sticker-giant-panini-did-not-defy-competition-law-eu-court-rules/
Lawyers are very smart people and I’m sure they would find a way around that, but EU will remember that Topps themselves once argued that Panini alone has a monopoly…
And also there is this from March of this year...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-05/baseball-card-maker-topps-owners-are-said-to-consider-sale
We will see what happens, but if I had to bet this will be the buyer if Panini actually gets sold...
http://collectibles.panini.co.uk/news.html?tx_news_pi1[news]=955&tx_news_pi1[controller]=News&tx_news_pi1[action]=detail&cHash=f54431b4abc9b4688cbcfaa1ff778f3a
