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How to play Aztec Gems
Cirsa shareholders will receive 0.668 newly issued Lottomatica shares for each of their shares in Cirsa.
Meanwhile Blackstone, Cirsa’s largest shareholder, is expected to become the largest shareholder of the combined company, maintaining around 24% of the share capital.
The deal is expected to provide around €115 million of pre-tax cash synergies per year from opex and interest cost savings. These synergies are expected to be realised by the third full year following completion.
How to play Aztec Gems
“An unregulated market doesn’t become a safe market. People will always gamble, so we have to make sure that we have a strong legal market. And so you also need to give us some room to exist. And of course, we need to be regulated. A regulated market is always better than an illegal market.”
She mentions an ongoing lawsuit against Meta, which will be expected to be very challenging. The VNLOK-filed litigation is seeking to take action against the illegal gambling ads allowed to filter through to consumers across Meta’s various platforms.
“There are about 70,000 ads every single month for illegal operators or offerings – and there’s only two or three thousand from the legal market. It’s really unbalanced and they should regulate more.
How to play Aztec Gems
For Japan, the question is whether this broader proposition could make casino resorts more socially and culturally palatable by giving visitors reasons to come, other than gambling.
But for Klebanow, the lesson Japan should take from Macau and Singapore extends beyond the importance of non-gaming attractions. It is also about how regulation should work. Policymakers, he argues, should establish basic legal and commercial guardrails, while giving operators sufficient “latitude” to “propose and develop projects that best serve both the residential and tourism markets”.
He points to Macau’s Cotai Strip and Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa as examples of how regulatory discipline can coexist with considerable freedom for developers to innovate. “At its core, Japan’s policies need to be pragmatic and allow for developments to succeed – not constrain them to the point that they risk failure.”
