The proposal to open up the Austrian street market to payout machines, but through major companies only, has been stalled by industry pressure. The Austrian Government was planning to polarise the entire market in arcades, pubs and bars, into one licence. This was due to be introduced from January 1, 2009.
Until now only four of the nine ‘Lander’ or provinces in Austria permit gaming machines. New national legislation, however, proposed by the Ministry of Finance, sought to change this to a national regulation. Only one licence to operate the machines would be permitted, but the holder should have a minimum of €50m in capital and €10m cash in a security at a bank. That effectively restricted the likely licence´holders to just three businesses - Casinos Austria, the Austrian Lottery (in which Casinos Austria has a 60 per cent stake) and Novomatic.
The four Austrian Lander with machines currently are Vienna, Lower Austria, Styria and Carinthia, but because of high taxation there are only about 7,000 AWP machines in the country. But there are 1,457 operators running those machines, many very small companies. They would have been put out of business by the new regulation. It would have also opened up the bidding process for a licence to non-Austrian companies as Austria is bound to offer the opportunity to any business based in another EC country.
The Austrian coin machine trade association, Automatenverband.At, has been working to stall the proposals and appears to have succeeded. The Minister of Commerce is reported to have held talks with the Secretary of State for Finance on the subject, following media coverage, which suggests that the information about the market, which had been the basis for the proposal, was fatally flawed.
All parties in the debate now agree that further discussion is needed after all of the individual Lander involved signalled that they were opposed to the plans as they stood in January.
