The latest market survey indicates that 56% of players bet on illegal sites, a trend that a report from 2018 (a year earlier) already showed, when it pointed to a 75% share. There are 13 legal operators in the country, running 22 gaming licenses. According to SRIJ data, the licensed activity last year generated gross revenues of the order of 215 million euros. In taxes, it paid 94.8 million euros.
According to Rui Magalhães' numbers, the Portuguese legal market “only represents 44%” of the overall pie of online gambling, estimating that unlicensed operators have guaranteed gross revenues last year (value resulting from subtracting prizes from total bets) more than 256 million euros in the country. He stresses to Dinheiro Vivo that the State “will have stopped collecting taxes, proportionally, a total of 120.6 million euros.”
Gambling during the pandemic
Why is illegal online gambling so appealing in the Portuguese market? For Rui Magalhães there are two fundamental reasons: the price and the offer of content. Illegal operators are already known to gamblers (the online gambling and betting offer is almost 20 years old) and offer “much more attractive prices, because they do not pay the high taxes of the regulated market, nor do they have any limitations on the product offer.”
In this chapter, companies licensed in Portugal have come to defend the legalization of products such as eSports, live-dealing, scratch-cards, among others. Rui Magalhães recalls that in neighboring Spain, where there are around 50 operators, the market is worth almost four times the Portuguese and there the presence of illegal operators is between 15% and 20%.
Despite unfair competition, online gambling has grown in revenue and in the number of licensed operators. In the first quarter of this year, the sector's gross revenues reached 69.8 million euros, an increase of 47.5% over the same period of 2019 and 6.7% compared to the last quarter of last year.
The volume of sports betting has not kept up with the upward trend of recent quarters, due to the suspension of multiple games caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus. Thus, sports betting totaled 149.1 million euros in the first three months of this year, a drop of 19.5% compared to the previous quarter, but an increase of 13.5% when compared to the same counterpart of 2019.
Conversely, the volume of bets on casino games rose to 960.8 million euros in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 57.9%, also due to the allocation of six more licenses. Compared to the fourth period of 2019, there was an increase of 12.7%. In the first three months of the year, the State collected 20.8 million euros in taxes, an increase of 40.1% over the same period in 2019.
Ads and scratch cards
But it is not only illegal online gambling that worries Rui Magalhães, who foresees the possibility that the activity will soon have another front of “unfair competition”. The PCP has a proposal to amend the law that aims to limit advertising of gambling in media such as television and radio, and where it defends rules such as those for tobacco and alcoholic beverages.
For Magalhães, this proposal raises two concerns: the fact that illegal operators have no limitations at this level, advertising in digital and even physical media; and be a discriminatory factor in relation to Santa Casa games, namely the Placard offer, a game made available in kiosks and other physical spaces and also on a digital level.
Rui Magalhães argues that online gambling may be like this "in the face of unfair competition, both in relation to illegal offers and in relation to bets and games under the Placard brand."
Another front that seems difficult to win is the scratch card. Despite the various complaints made to authorities, this social game is also sold online, “in a format that is similar to the definition of a slot machine and with games that present, for the most part, children's motives, appealing to the public in a way that is prohibited by the law that governs online gambling.”
For Rui Magalhães, the Portuguese adhesion to the scratch card “is massive and worrying”, remembering that it is the game that sells the most in Portugal - in 2018, it was worth 1.6 billion euros of revenues -, “almost three times more than all physical casinos and legal online gaming operators.” And this, when the scratch card is easy to access and with a very short cycle time, in which in a few seconds it is possible to know the result and activate the psychological and psychochemical mechanisms that enhance the addiction and the risky behaviors.
Source: Dinheiro Vivo
