The site will have table games, slot machines, live casino, video bingo, sports betting, among others. It can be accessed from computers and cell phones. The site is already operational from this Monday, February 20.
The platform, according to Enjoy, is different from to the recreational gaming site developed in the midst of a pandemic, launched in Chile, and which did not allow money transactions.
“Enjoywin is a project that has been in the making for a long time and was conceived with a very clear strategy: to offer an online betting site in the countries where Enjoy has face-to-face operations. For that, we get together with leading companies in the field of online gaming,” says Marianela Artoni, Enjoy's product and innovation manager, to DF MAS.
She adds: “During the pandemic and with our casinos closed, we felt the need to maintain ties with our clients and we launched enjoywin.net, a free recreational site for players (there were no real money bets), where we had an excellent reception with thousands of customers who joined to play, which was undoubtedly a great confirmation that they were looking for this game variant and opportunities for entertainment online. EnjoyWin.com is the answer to that need of thousands of clients, which for now will only be available in the Brazilian market.”
For the development of this new business, they put together a dedicated team based in Montevideo, Uruguay. It is a multidisciplinary group of 15 people with experience in the online gaming industry. They all speak at least three languages, comments from the national firm, which did not reveal the amount of investment to build this project.
Flights to Brazil
The reasons for arriving in Brazil are multiple. The main one is that it is a country that has regulated this industry since 2018, when they legalized sports betting on the internet. In 2022 they did the same with online casinos.
Another factor is the size of the market: it is the largest and most populous country on the continent, with more than 214 million inhabitants and an Internet penetration of over 75%. This is coupled with estimates of potential growth in the iGaming industry: by 2026 this item would exceed US$ 2.6 billion.
“With more than 151 million smartphone users, Brazil has become a true giant for the online gaming business, where online betting in the sports industry has shown great market interest in this type of entertainment, which since February 2023 can also work for the 27 states of that country in relation to monetary bets from online casinos. Enjoy will be one of those new players in the market,” the company explained.
But there is another reason. “The Brazilian market already knows and identifies better with the Enjoy brand given the proximity they have with our Enjoy Punta del Este casino. Our brand is more identifiable for that market that frequents casinos and already plays online on other platforms. The logical step was to go to Brazil given its proximity and the high figures and projections”, explains Marianela Artoni.
“Growth projections in this industry are closely linked to the investments in marketing and advertising that we make. In a first step, we will work with one of the main assets we have as a company, the base of thousands of customers from Brazil who already know us,” she adds.
Complementary business
Just one year ago, Enjoy made official the end of its judicial reorganization, a process that lasted almost two years and implied that its creditors became shareholders. In addition, the departure of Javier Martínez, historic president of the firm, was finalized. The agreement to avoid bankruptcy was to reduce the level of indebtedness by converting at least 70% of the debt into shares.
With these new airs, Enjoy seeks to leave behind the years of losses and look to the future. The decision to launch an online gaming platform responds to various studies carried out on the online gambling industry, which has grown exponentially in the last ten years, but especially since 2020, with the start of the health crisis. Today, the big casinos in the world also have online gaming spaces that allow them to diversify their income, so they could not stay below the trend.
“The big players in the industry receive a large percentage of their income from online gambling. Obviously it is a relevant source of business, but also complementary to the current one. We hope that this item can be allowed in the markets where we have a physical presence soon,” explains the executive.
Fusion with Dreams
At the end of September 2021 Enjoy and Dreams - a firm linked to the brothers Claudio and Humberto Fischer - reached a preliminary agreement to merge their operations.
The objective, they informed the local regulator, was to strengthen its leadership in the casino industry in the rest of Latin America. And also, precisely, to develop new business areas, such as "egaming and other initiatives in the entertainment sector, which will benefit from the greater scale and geographical diversification, which will undoubtedly allow us to deliver a better offer of value for our clients,” expressed -in January 2022- Henry Comber, president of Enjoy.
The procedures to unify their businesses are being reviewed by the National Economic Prosecutor's Office (FNE). In fact, last December Diario Financiero announced that both companies proposed to the antitrust agency different mitigation measures to decompress its interference in the Metropolitan region: one of them would be to return the Enjoy Rinconada license, whose permit expires in 2024.
How will Enjoy's new online business work with the merger process with Dreams? Marianela Artoni states: "This is a project that began a long time ago and that we have continued to develop as it generates value for the company in any future scenario."
In any case, sources linked to the firm comment that this has nothing to do with the merger process and that issues related to strategic businesses are maintained by each company separately.
Source: GMB / DF MAS
