Colombia Gambling Market
Gambling industry is growing all the time and brings new options for customers. If we take a look at the Latin American gaming market, we can observe a $2 billion growth over the previous years. The top gaming countries in the Latin American continent are Mexico and Argentina while Colombia and Chile follow the same trend. According to a survey conducted in 2019, chance games were the favorite gambling activities of Colombians, favored by 55 percent of those surveyed. Try our corporate solution for free!
Colombia Gambling Marketing
It seems the inevitable is about to happen in the betting industry of Colombia. There is every chance they’ll lose the man that helped guide and immensely contributed to the making the nation the first South American market to regulate and formally legalize online betting.
At the start of this week, the president of Coljuegos, Juan B. Pérez Hidalgo, Colombia’s gambling regulatory body, relinquished the role he’s held for about five years.
César Augusto Valencia, a business graduate of Pennsylvania’s Drexel University and an administrator at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla will take his place.
The major problem people have with this announcement is that although he comes with the necessary qualifications, he has little to no experience in the betting industry.
Some media outlets in Colombia had reported that Perez’s tenure was coming to an end about four weeks ago. According to reports from these outlets, they disclosed that Alberto Carrasquilla Barrera from the Minister of Finance had asked Perez to step down from his role at the helm of affairs for some undisclosed ‘political’ reasons.
When Perez was steering the affairs of the industry, Colombia approved legislation for online gambling in 2016. That’s not all, the country also gave Aquila Global’s Wplay.co website its first online license the next year.
As you might have predicted, the floodgates opened and several other operators followed. Grupo Vinnare became the 18th licensee towards the end of 2019. Presently, only sixteen platforms are active.
This week, Perez had a chat with a local media outlet, La Republica, he disclosed that online gambling accounted for 10 percent of the gambling market of Colombia in 2019; however, this share commendably doubled in 2020. This can be largely attributed to the impact of the pandemic land-based gambling.
Also, online gambling has been on the increase since the market was reopened. According to Perez, he said that online gambling produced COP5.36 billion (US$1.47 million) in 2017, COP37.9 billion in 2018, COP78.5 billion in 2019 and COP54.9 million in this year ending September.
The betting market experienced a new birth in October thanks to Zamba.co as the website became the first Coljuegos-licensed website to unveil a live casino option. This was after the regulator gave the green light for such activity.
Perez was also in charge of efforts to block all domains of competitors that are internationally licensed on Coljuegos-licensed websites.
On the other hand, this proved to be an impractical fight in almost all markets that this move has been tried on. This did not deter Perez as he believed he’ll make headway.
Colombia Gambling Markets
He went on to sign a new deal with the Ministry of Information, Technology and Communications this September. The aim of the deal is to take necessary actions against more than 4,100 domains names on the blacklist.
Not considering setbacks, pioneering path Colombia took attracted more than just local Spanish-language operators as Betsson – as United States operator Rush Street Interactive and European firm – took about 70 percent stake in Colbet, an online licensee in Colombia last July.
Colombia Gambling Market Size
This move was after they made a similar purchase in Brazil which has become a market that has been trying to follow the lead created by Colombia for several years now.
Source:https://calvinayre.com/2020/11/25/business/colombia-online-gambling-coljuegos-regulator-perez-quits/