SeaWorld’s newest attraction is really cool, complete with glaciers, snow and penguins

LOS ANGELES — SeaWorld Entertainment Inc.’s Antarctica: Empire of the Penguin attraction, which opened Friday at the company’s namesake theme park in Orlando, features 50-foot glaciers, 2,500 glass icicles and up-close encounters with 230 penguins, dusted daily with 6,000 pounds of snow.

“It is the coolest attraction in the world,” president and chief executive Jim Atchison said. “You kind of check out of the rest of SeaWorld and find yourself in Antarctica.” the year.

Bookings for equipment meant to last at least three years increased 3.3 per cent last month after dropping 5.9 per cent in March, the Commerce Department said Friday in Washington.

To Atchison, it’s also an example of how private-equity firms, often criticized for dismantling the companies they buy, can jump-start a business like SeaWorld. Blackstone Group LP bought the company, which owns 11 parks in five states, for $2.3 billion from Anheuser-Busch InBev NV in December 2009. As a small part of the world’s largest brewer, SeaWorld was starved. Atchison, who took Orlando, Fla.-based SeaWorld public last month in an $807 million share sale, called the last years under has approved plans to split its entertainment and publishing businesses into two separate companies.

News Corp. also said Friday that the target date for the split is June 28. The company holding its TV and movie properties will be 21st Century Fox. The new News Corp., a smaller entity, will be focused on newspapers and publishing. Both will be publicly traded. the brewer’s ownership “a drought period.”

Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm by assets, with $218.2 billion under management, had an inside view of the industry. It owned half of the Universal Orlando resort, a stake sold to Comcast Corp. in 2011, and Merlin Entertainments Group, parent of Legoland. Universal’s Islands of Adventure park in Orlando increased attendance by 66 per cent from 2009 to 2011 after opening the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, according to the Themed Entertainment Association.

The new owners gave Atchison, whose has held executive roles with SeaWorld since 1998, the goahead to crank up capital spending — from $120 million in 2010 to $225 million the following year and $192 million in 2012. That let SeaWorld add 11 attractions last year, filings show.

SeaWorld stock has risen 39 per cent since the offering, making New York-based Blackstone’s 63-per-cent stake worth $2.2 billion. points for May from 104.4 last month.

The upturn followed two consecutive declines and beat economists’ expectations of a very slight increase to 104.5.

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