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Brazil’s newly licensed online gambling operators generated more than US$3bn in gross revenue in the first six months after regulation, putting the Brazilian market well on track to become the second largest in the world.
Operators of fixed-odds betting reported total gross gaming revenue of R$17.4bn, or approximately US$3.2bn, over the six-month period between the regulated market’s launch on January 1 and the end of June, according to the first official statistics on the market that were published on Tuesday (August 26) by the Brazilian Ministry of Finance’s Secretariat for Prizes and Bets (SPA).
In a presentation highlighting fiscal, commercial and enforcement activities to date, the SPA also disclosed that federal telecoms authority ANATEL had blocked a total of 15,463 unlicensed gambling sites since blocking began in October.
Regulators have also had the social-media pages of some 112 influencers removed by online platforms due to their promotion of illegal gambling, while the payments accounts of 45 offshore operators have been closed after the SPA informed 13 different payments institutions regarding their activities.
A further 255 individuals’ payments accounts used to channel money to offshore sites have also been closed after being flagged by Brazilian banks or payments companies, the SPA said.
Meanwhile, the SPA said it had initiated 66 enforcement actions against a total of 54 licensed operators due to compliance failings, resulting in 35 administrative penalty proceedings.
Policy Pressures
In an interview with leading Brazilian newspaper Folha also published Tuesday, SPA secretary Régis Dudena said these enforcement actions against licensed companies had yet to be published because they were currently in the appeals process, but they “principally related to the offering of bets that were not payable”.
Dudena also told Folha he understood why certain Brazilian interest groups, including commercial retailers and the banking sector, have voiced fierce criticisms of online gambling, but he was focused on establishing effective controls for an industry that exploded in popularity without any form of regulatory oversight prior to this year.
The SPA chief also reiterated his view that imposing harsh restrictions on advertising would be premature, although he acknowledged that some additional limits are likely to be introduced sooner or later.
Brazil’s Senate approved legislation in late May to restrict broadcast advertising to late at night, ban advertising by influencers and other celebrities, and limit the amount of betting sponsors at sporting events, among other restrictions.
“Obviously [advertising] perhaps at some point needs to be controlled a little bit more, with certain restrictions, but in the first phase of opening the market this exposure makes sense, specifically so that the bettor knows how to differentiate between the legal betting sites and the illegal ones,” Dudena said.
Brazil’s chief gambling regulator told Folha that he “would not look favourably on a total ban [on advertising] at this moment”.
Still, “the exposure of athletes [in betting advertising], for example… if that’s something that people consider to be undesirable, then eventually it’s going to be restricted. What can’t we do? We can’t want to do everything, all at once.”
A Major Market
The presentation published on Tuesday marks the first time any official data on the Brazilian market has been released by the regulator, but Dudena said the SPA would be releasing updated information periodically going forward.
Per the SPA’s statistics, some 17.7m Brazilians have registered an account with a licensed online betting site since January, 71.1 percent of them being male. Players aged 31-40 account for 27.6 percent of Brazilian bettors, ahead of 25-30 year-olds and 18-25 year-olds which both represent around 22 percent of the overall player base.
Dudena said that having official statistics on the market, rather than mere estimates, was “fundamentally important” since it would allow for “the debate on the fixed-odds betting market in Brazil to be based on more solid elements, enabling us to move forward with evidence-based regulation”.
Until Tuesday, it had only been possible to infer the size of the Brazilian market based on limited tax data published by Brazil’s Federal Revenue Service, which had actually implied a GGR market size of US$2.7bn through the end of July.
Based on that tax data, Vixio had forecasted the regulated Brazilian market to amount to US$4.8bn in total GGR for 2025, before reaching $10.3bn by 2028. That would make Brazil comfortably the second largest regulated market globally, ahead of Italy and behind only the UK.
