Success in bwin bid will help GVC expand

GVC Holding’s successful bid for Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment opens up growth opportunities in Africa and Latin America thanks to the high profile Bwin brand, the Wall Street Journal opined in an article Saturday.

Thanks to modern internet technology and the rapidly expanding availability of smartphones, a market that consists of literally millions of gamblers will be developing over future years, presenting tempting business opportunities for companies equipped to take full advantage.

Bwin.party has spent huge sums on marketing and has a large customer base on its popular games, the article explains. It has also achieved high awareness globally through its sponsorships and associations with some of the world’s most famous football clubs, including international favourites like Real Madrid and Manchester United.

The company also possesses sophisticated sports betting operational and customer-retention-management systems, key to success in a competitive industry.

All of these advantages will now accrue to GVC, which is already strongly positioned in the less-competitive Latin American market and has ambitions in Asia and Africa as well.

South Africa arguably has the continent’s largest economy and is likely to be a prime target from a sports betting perspective, along with Nigeria and Kenya; a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study estimated that by 2018 these three nations alone will have gambling markets worth $37 billion.

Online-payments technologies are also developing quickly in Africa, removing one of the main hurdles to business – how people without bank accounts can conduct financial transactions with gambling sites.

“Online sports and gambling companies like GVC, coming under increasing regulatory pressures in their traditional European markets, are eager to place early bets in the Third World,” the WSJ concludes.

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