Olympic Entertainment Group and GHolding have agreed to develop and operate VLT slot facilities in Italy.
The Box S.r.l joint venture will see three VLT casinos featuring between 50 and 70 VLTs open in Northern Italy by the end of 2013, with OEG planning to invest €4.5m in this period.
“This is a major challenge for us, being the first time that Olympic EG will be offering modern casino entertainment in western Europe, and particularly on the strictly regulated Italian market,” said Armin Karu, chairman of the board of OEG, adding that involving an experienced partner in Italy was a significant and strategic decision.
“The key is to combine the experience of both partners, the local market knowledge of GHolding and strong capitalisation of OEG, ensuring sufficiently rapid growth, as necessary.”
Italy has only four fully-fledged casinos, all of them in municipal ownership. There are total of 56,500 VLT slot licenses issued for the term of ten years. The largest concessionaire is Lottomatica, the leading world operator in the lottery sector that has a license for 10,000 VLT slots and will also be leasing the license and VLT slots to The Box S.r.l.
Since 2006, GHolding has been operating small VLT game rooms under the La Casa del Gioco brand. The company manages 73 gaming locations, of which 15 belong to GHolding and the remaining 58 are affiliate contracts.
“This format is very similar to the current gaming halls of Olympic Casino and we hope to successfully implement the same concept also in Italy,” said Madis Jääger (pictured), CEO of OEG. “In the first phase we are talking about three gaming locations with a total of couple of hundred VLT slots, but the potential is much higher.”
