Not sure if this is the correct thread to post this in, but Amaya/PokerStars has been in the news this past week following its annual shareholders meeting. Here's a summary of what has made the news cycle.
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* Amaya shareholders have approved a name change to "The Stars Group" along with a corporate HQ move from the greater Montreal, Quebec area (the province where former CEO David Baazov's insider trading trial is scheduled to begin in November) to Toronto, Ontario.
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* The official move is expected to take place in August. Only one article (by Steven Stradbrooke of CalvinAyre) out of the roughly 20 I've read suggest the move is linked to Brian Kyle (newly-named CFO of Amaya/The Stars Group) and his "apparent unwillingness" to relocate. The article by Stradbrooke also reports that Amaya already has around 300 individuals working near Toronto.
https://calvinayre.com/2017/06/21/bu...orate-rebrand/
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* Amaya/The Stars Group has announced it is working with a partner in India (unnamed, but one that it says already has a license to operate online gambling in all but two states in that country) to possibly enter that market by year's end -- citing 1.2 billion mobile users that could make up for loss in revenue from Australia and other markets where legislation has not been favorable. This is not a done deal, just an announcement that negotiations are underway.
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* Q1 2017 results (actually released in May 2017) show continued growth in casino/sports-betting for Amaya/The Stars Group. Online poker accounted for 69% of all revenue in Q1 (down from 75% YOY). However, overall revenue for Amaya increased 10% YOY from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017 due to growth in casino/sports wagering, beating analysts' expectations.
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* Amaya/The Stars Group's strategy appears to be to continue to use the PokerStars brand and its global recognition to entice endusers onto its platform in an attempt to introduce them to its non-poker products and further diversify its revenue. Although the quote below comes off as disingenuous to many of us who have been contributing to/lurking NVG, PokerStars (imo) does in fact benefit from its global brand recognition, established by years of mass marketing.
"As we undergo this transformation, we look to embrace the future of our business while also recognizing the incredible consumer goodwill and loyalty associated with our primary brand." - Rafi Ashkenazi, Amaya/The Stars Group CEO (May 2017 - Q1 Earnings conference call)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/amay...ange-1.4112095
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* Amaya's stock price is up around 20% since January, with some articles referencing "paying down debt" as a reason for this. If you look at the "PokerStars Chests" thread here in NVG, you'll find that "restructuring debt" may be a more appropriate term, as the company agreed to pay "three months of late fees" to former owners Isai & Mark Scheinberg in order to defer a $200 million (approx.) payment that was due Feb 1, 2017.
https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news...erstars-owners
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I'm no expert in this field, but judging from publicly-available information I'd say that Amaya/PokerStars (as it has purported all along) is not overly concerned with an exodus of professional, high volume players to its online poker competitors. It will continue to shift its focus to casino/sports-betting, and use its big-budget marketing to drown out/dismiss concerns it believes are only being pushed by a "small yet vocal minority" of disgruntled, mostly high-volume poker players.
The move towards quickly ensuring short-term profit is a logical one in a vacuum, yet doesn't settle the issue of what happens in the medium-term when online casino punters lose interest (my term for "going busto") and are not contributing to Amaya/PokerStars' revenue in relative perpetuity like thousands of online poker players have over the past decade.
The business model relies of consistently bringing in "new blood" and ushering them towards casino/sports-betting. In this sense, perhaps the move away from Neymar Jr & Ronaldo simply means that their respective fan bases were considered to have been sufficiently crawled, and it was time to move on to other big mainstream names with different bases such as Kevin Hart, Usain Bolt and Tito Ortiz. Rinse & repeat in a couple of years if that's the case, as celebs can easily maneuver in and out of such deals with ease in today's marketing environment.
The big question in my mind is whether online casino gambling as we know it stands a chance against online eSports betting which some believe could already take over the real money wagering world if it were regulated in certain markets.
Amaya's focus on "Time on Machine Entertainment" will get laughed out of the market once/if eSports real money wagering takes hold, and poker in my opinion is much better suited to co-exist with that market (even with card games such as Hearthstone included) compared to your run-of-the-mill online casino. In my opinion this is why some of the voices in our industry have made such a big deal about how video games will eventually be poker's main competitor (see Alex Dreyfus quote in this October 2015 article
http://www.pokermind.in/alex-dreyfus...-online-poker/ ).
So Amaya/The Stars Group will need to continue to rely on a number of maxrolls to get their product in front of new audiences, which of course means upfront "make it legal" costs while warding off opposition in a number of key jurisdictions in which it currently operates, paying down its debt, finding out a solution or coming out on top in its "Kentucky Clawback" battle, ignoring negative press related to its former CEO and treatment of professional players through its "broken SNE promise," etc.
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Hope this helps. Again, I'm not anywhere close to one of the most informed individuals on this, but wanted to share my insight nonetheless. Please feel free to comment & to move this into the appropriate thread if this isn't the place for it.
-David
Last edited by dhubermex; 06-24-2017 at 01:27 PM.