Merkado Barkada
November 22, 2024 | 8:00am
DigiPlus [PLUS 20.20, up 1.3%; 43% avgVol] [link] said its application for a digital gaming license in Brazil has passed the “qualification stage” and has now entered the “final stages of the licensing process”. PLUS said it has 30 days to fulfill a series of certification requirements before Brazil’s government will announce the final list of approved operators. If approved, PLUS will be permitted to operate its digital gaming platform in Brazil starting on January 1st in the new year. The company said that it is looking to operate online sports betting “and other iGaming offerings” in the market, which it describes as “newly regulated” and “one of Latin America’s most dynamic and rapidly growing gaming markets.”
MB bottom-line: As I’ve discussed before, I appreciate PLUS’s calculated approach to its international expansion. It could have taken the “TECH” approach and incorporated some amazing-sounding subsidiary, like “DigiPlus MegaGlobal OmniEntertainment Inc.”, and then made vague references to an impossibly-large total addressable market without providing any specifics on where it would start or why it had chosen those particular markets (out of the entire world) to operate in. Instead, PLUS skipped the high-profile hype phase and just picked Brazil, which is a market that shares a lot of common ground with ours, and it picked a market that would allow it to begin operating very quickly if approved. PLUS is playing to its own strengths and (so far) resisting the temptation to speak too generally about the opportunities it could pursue, and instead seems focused on tangible opportunities with goalposts (timing and market size) and delivering measurable results. Some of the shine has worn off the PLUS stock in recent months. It’s down about 16% from its late-August high, but it seems to have stabilized in this P20.00 to P21.50 base-building range.
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