Public | |
Traded as | : SEAS |
Industry | Theme park operator |
Founded | March 15, 1960 |
Headquarters | Orlando, Florida, United States |
Area served
|
Orlando, Florida; San Antonio, Texas; San Diego, California; Chula Vista, California; Tampa, Florida; Williamsburg, Virginia; Langhorne, Pennsylvania |
Key people
|
Joel Manby, CEO |
Products | Theme park attractions, rides, and games |
Revenue | USD$1.377 billion (2014) |
USD$160.59 million (2014) | |
USD$49.9 million (2014) | |
Total assets | USD$2.44 billion (2014) |
Total equity | USD$579.5 million (2014) |
Number of employees
|
22,100 |
Website | Official website |
SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment is a family entertainment, amusement park and attraction company headquartered in Orlando, Florida. It operates seven theme parks and five water parks in the United States.
Formerly a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch since 1989, under which it was known as Busch Entertainment Corporation, in October 2009, Anheuser-Busch InBev announced plans to sell the division to private-equity firm The Blackstone Group in order to reduce the debt load generated by InBev's 2008 purchase of Anheuser-Busch. The sale was completed on December 1, 2009 and with it came a new company name, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment. It became a publically traded company in 2012.
Anheuser-Busch initially created the subsidiary to run the various Busch Gardens parks. The parks at Tampa, Florida and Williamsburg, Virginia were located adjacent to breweries, and the parks included tours of the facilities and even free samples of the products made there.
In 1989, Anheuser-Busch purchased the theme park unit of publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, which included the SeaWorld family of parks. The purchase also included two other parks in Central Florida: Cypress Gardens and Boardwalk and Baseball. Boardwalk and Baseball was promptly closed, while Cypress Gardens was later sold and transformed into Legoland Florida, which opened in October 2011. The parks were managed out of Anheuser-Busch's headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri until 2008, when the company relocated the division to Florida, where five of the company's ten parks were located.