On Wednesday, Mint newspaper reported that India has requested Google cease showing ads for overseas betting companies, according to source aware of the development in the ministry of information and broadcasting.
Alphabet’s Inc’s Google India received an official letter asking the company to remove all direct and surrogate advertising from such online betting companies as Fairplay, PariMatch, and Betway from their search results and youtube pages, according to the report.
The call comes in response to India’s planned regulation of online gaming. Although there had been a proposal to only regulate games of skill and not games of chance such as gambling, the prime minister’s office overruled the proposal, meaning all real-money games played online will be regulated.
A senior ministry official said to Mint, “After our last advisory on 3 October, TV channels and OTT (Over-the-top) players stopped showing surrogate ads of online betting firms, but it was brought to our notice that many such ads are running on YouTube and Google. We have asked Google to stop this immediately.”
In their draft report on regulating online games, the officials assigned to produce the report proposed India create a regulatory body which would classify games as either games of skill or games of chance, block restricted formats through the use of rules, and act more strictly toward gambling websites,,
In other gambling news, a Bloomberg gauge which tracks six casino operators rose 8.6%, to its highest level since September of 2021, with MGM China Holdings Ltd. and Wynn Macau Ltd. leading the gains.
Macau’s reopening is seen as another sign the pandemic is rapidly fading as an economic repressor in China, and the world’s second biggest economy is back on track to reopen for business fully in the near future. That will broadly aid risk assets as they head into recessionary headwinds.
Macau casino operators have been triggering increasingly bullish sentiments from analysts. DS Kim from JPMorgan has called 2023 the “year of Macau” as casino operators benefit from cheap valuations, heading into a reopening of the Asian markets.
Morgan Stanley analysts, led by Praveen K Choudhary wrote in a note Monday, the sector is expected to be fully recovered by 2024, when there should be a normalization of earnings growth.
