Kevin Moran won two All-Ireland Gaelic football championships with Dublin, and had a noted foot-balling career with Manchester United FC. He is known for his ability to seize an opportunity, sometimes a risky one. He was also the first man to be sent off in an FA Cup Final.
Moran knew he was onto something big when his spread-betting company Worldspreads was being courted by gaming giant SportingBet PLC. The publicly traded bookmaker had an acquisition deal worth £40m on the table and Moran and his partner, Paul McGinley, another Irish sporting star, were close to cashing in. But that all changed when Sportingbet’s then non-executive chairman Peter Dicks was apprehended in America as part of that country's crackdown on illegal online gambling. SportingBet's share value then plummeted after the US government enacted anti online gaming legislation. The company’s stock was worth £1.9 billion at it's peak in 2006. It's market capitalisation now sits at just £180m. SportingBet abandoned the Worldspreads deal all together and the once acquisition hungry public company was forced to shed staff and operations after gave up US players. A demographic that represented close to 75% of it's income
The Worldspreads deal was not the only one that suffered the industry downturn. SportingBet was close to signing a deal to acquire WorldGaming, a software company with over 200 employees and offices in London, Vancouver and Costa Rica. The deal was nixed at the 11th hour due to the new US legislation. World Gaming was then forced to suspend dealings in its own shares due to an “uncertainty over its ability to continue trading.” A notice placed a their website reads "World Gaming Plc and certain subsidiaries have had administrators appointed."
But all is not stagnant for Investment capitalists and acquisition in the industry. Recently GigaMedia, a company who operates multi-lingual casinos and the Everestpoker.com site acquired FunTown, the world's largest online Mahjong game site in terms of revenue, with a view to further expand its non-US facing offerings. CGTV, a Canadian cable TV provider, acquired Gambling Federation another multi-lingual gaming product developer and operator in Q3 of this year. It is widely agreed that driving the publicly traded gaming operators from the US market has forced their American ex-customers to smaller non-traded gaming operations. An insider at a Curacao licensed US facing bookmaker said "(We) spent over £3m in advertising during the lead-up to the NFL season. I would estimate that we garnered twice the new business than that from those sports bettors who were forced to find another book after they could no longer play at the (Publicly traded companies)."
WorldSpreads' two Irish founders remain buoyant on the prospects for the company. They have raised just under £4m in investment and continue to seek a major partner. Before they can they, like many gaming company owners wanting to cash in, must wait for private money and then public interest to return to the sector.
