UK gambling giant GVC Holdings is undergoing a metamorphosis of both style and substance as it looks to shut the door on its youthful black market escapades.
On Thursday, GVC announced a plan to rebrand as Entain plc “to reflect the Group’s ambition to be the world-leader in sports betting and gaming entertainment.” Frankly, it’s now unclear what the company’s ambition was prior to Thursday, nor why this goal was unachievable under its former corporate identity but, hey, consultants gotta eat too.
While shareholders will be given the chance to weigh in on this rebranding exercise, GVC/Entain also plans to divorce itself from its former grey/black-market reliance. GVC claimed that 96% of its revenue comes from markets that are “nationally regulated or regulating” but the company has set a goal of pushing this to 99% by the end of this year and to derive 100% of revenue from regulated markets “by the end of 2023.”
The ‘or regulating’ qualifier is a big enough ‘but’ that GVC might well have chosen to rebrand as Kardashian Gaming, in that it’s GVC/Entain that gets to define whether a market intends to legalize or simply tolerate certain gambling activities. Regardless, the company maintains that it will exit markets “in which there are currently no viable paths to regulation.”