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Online gaming in Italy is facing a very interesting growth in the last months in the sportsbetting and casino markets that are recovering the market from its crisis. Also, the recent measures against the so called CTDs are expected to boost the land-based sector as well.
After long discussions about the crisis of the online gaming market in Italy especially with reference to sportsbetting and poker in the last months some good news come from the latest unofficial data.
The sportsbetting market
The most relevant change comes from the major growth of the online sportsbetting market which is due to the entrance in the market of new players that clearly attracted the interest of players. With a few additional operators that will join the Italian online gaming market in the next months, all the major operators will be represented in the country which will consolidate even more its leadership in Europe just after the UK.
Also, as previously discussed, the major factor necessary to push the Italian online gaming market will be the change in the taxation for sportsbetting switching to a 20% gross gaming revenue regime. There is currently a law empowering the Government to review the taxation for games by mid-2015 and hopefully such change will be part of the measures implemented.
The casino market
I discussed in the past about the initiative from some casino game suppliers to prevent their .COM operators from offering their games to Italians without an Italian online gaming license. Well, the first suppliers stopped their operators’ .COM offerings which led to a 20% growth of the online casino market that is expected to further grow once the other game suppliers will adopt the same course of action by the end of the year.
And in the landbased sector?
One of the major issues of the landbased sector in Italy is given by the massive number of CTDs i.e. Internet cafes that are run under a foreign online gaming license as betting shops. CTDs are deemed to be more than 5,000, but their number might decrease following the measures adopted by the Italian tax police that is challenging to them the lack of payment of Italian gaming taxes and of any other corporate taxes.
Indeed, Italian gaming duting and taxes are due even if operations are run under a foreign license. And as part of such type of initiatives is the one that just led to the seizure of € 56 M belonging to Stanleybet to which the lack of payment of revenue taxes is currently challenged.
We shall see the developments of the matter, but in the meantime feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio to discuss. Also, if you want to receive my newsletter, please join my LinkedIn Group or my Facebook page. And follow me on Twitter, Google+ and become one of my friends on LinkedIn.
