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How to play Fire Hot 5
“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.
What is Fire Hot 5?
But, as Robinson warns, the opportunity to enter Africa doesn’t come without challenges.
“It’s profitable, it’s growing and it was for sale from a distressed vendor,” he says. “That combination rarely appears in regulated Europe, where scaling a B2C brand means paying up for customers against Flutter and Entain on thin margins.
“Africa isn’t saturated, but I wouldn’t call it easy either. Betway and the local incumbents are well dug in. The difference is that you’re competing for a market that’s still forming, at a fraction of the acquisition cost, and the operating margin is there if you get the payments and the product right. The risk is regulatory and currency rather than competitive.”
How to play Fire Hot 5
Yet Dan Waugh, partner at Regulus Partners, pushes back against the idea that enforcement notices reveal a fundamentally non-compliant sector.
“Operators failing compliance checks is never a good look,” he says. Campaigners often claim that financial sanctions are priced in and that the Commission should revoke more licences, although Waugh does not believe operators view settlements merely as a cost of doing business.
Nor are regulatory breaches unique to gambling. Waugh notes that Tesco was fined more than £8 million for food hygiene failings in 2021, without parliamentarians demanding that it should be prevented from selling cornflakes.
