Regulatory worries have been depressing the shares of online gambling companies in Germany for the last year, and these worries deepened last week after Germany's state governments revealed proposals to introduce a 16.7% turnover tax on online sports gambling, and to limit the provision of online casino and poker to those operators that held a land-based license.

This development was particularly bad news for the newly formed company Bwin Party Digital Entertainment, which currently generates between 27 and 30% of its earnings in Germany and saw its shares lose a third of their value on the announcement. Of course that weakness is assuming a worst-case scenario of the total loss of German earnings, and this is certainly not a guaranteed outcome as the state governments may soften their stance before the regulation becomes law at the end of this year.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 11:36 am and is filed under Sports Gambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.