By Steve Kim

In the coming weeks, UFC President Dana White will hold several meetings with various parties in the boxing industry, to discuss the UFC's plan to enter the sport.

For several months, White has discussed his intention to become a player in boxing - with the support of the UFC's parent company.

White has been on a boxing fix since last August, when the biggest star in his company - UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor - made his professional boxing debut in a losing effort against Floyd Mayweather, who at 40 was returning from a two year retirement.

Top Rank's CEO, Bob Arum, is not threatened by the possibility of White and the UFC staging boxing events - but the veteran promoter believes White is making that move in order to save his company. 

Arum believes White's back is against the wall, because their biggest stars, like Conor McGregor and Georges St. Pierre are looking for massive paydays to fight again. McGregor may have made as much as $100 million from the Mayweather fight and appears to have little interest in returning to the UFC - unless the purse is tremendous.

So with White's recent dalliance with the sport of boxing, will it eventually create further divisions within the business, which is already fractured?

"No, I think he needs boxing desperately because people are just waking up to the fact - which we knew - that the UFC is on the balls of it's ass," stated Arum to BoxingScene.com.

"They did an unbelievable job building the product, the Fertitta's sold it for billions of dollars and now the buyers are left with something that's flawed," the veteran promoter continued.

"You can't really perform the way you did before when you don't have any marquee stars and they don't have any marquee stars. And the ones who can be [stars], who are are out there like McGregor, like Georges St. Pierre - they now have woken up and they ain't going to fight for peanuts relative to the money involved.

"Dana's going to have to pay them the way we pay boxers. Therefore he is suffering in effect because the buyers who he's responsible to now have paid so  much money for the entity and how are they going to get it back? How are you going to monetize?"

In years past, White didn't hesitate to disparage boxing and how it was run. The disdain between White and Arum is well-chronicled.

Arum opined to BoxingScene - "MMA, except maybe with Brazil - which has it's own problems - isn't popular around the world and in the United States and the houses where they packed the places, they're half-empty now and the pay-per-view numbers are in the toilet.

"The numbers when they program against us, them on FOX, we on ESPN - we beat the crap out of them."

Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.