The greatest effect of the recently opened online gaming market in the Netherlands has been on Dutch brick-and-mortar casinos. That’s the conclusion of the Kansspelautoriteit’s (KSA) “2022 Market Scan” which follows the performance of the two-year-old regulated market, SBC News reported October 20.
The regulated market launched October 1, 2021.
According to the report, “opening of the online gambling market has had an impact on the land-based market, evident from current trends and data presented by the Gambling Market Scan of 2022.”
In 2022 “the licensed gaming market” recorded a gross gaming result (GGR) of €3.4 billion, an 85 percent increase of the €2 billion in 2021.
KSA attributes this to the reopening of online and land-based casinos after being closed by Covid restrictions until January 2022.
Online casinos have grabbed a larger market share, with online gaming growing while land-based casinos declined, so that online gaming accounts for 31 percent of total BSR, compared to 69 percent for brick and mortar facilities.
The sports betting sector grew from 4 percent in 2021 to nearly 10 percent in 2022, with 8 percent being online.
The report said the average Dutch adult spent €258 on gambling in 2022, up from €158 in 2021 and more than the pre-Covid average of €221 in 2019.
Licensed Dutch operators are banned from advertising on TV, radio, print or outdoor advertising.
In a separate but related development, two Dutch MP’s, Silvio Erkens and Chris Stoffer are attempting to amend the Netherlands Gambling Tax Act to increase the percentage paid by online gaming operators by one percentage point to 30.5 percent, iGaming Business reported October 25.
In justifying the proposal, the amendment states that online gaming popularity “has led to a significant increase in the turnover of online gambling companies.”
The lawmakers said they wanted to hike to apply on to online gaming, but could not because the gambling tax does not differentiate between online and brick and mortar operators.
The amendment calls for applying the new tax by 2025 and states: “Once that is the case, the additional revenue from the increase in gambling tax as a result of this amendment can be found by taxing online gambling companies more heavily, to the extent that the increase can be reversed for all other taxpayers.”
