Press Release N° 7
ENADA – ITALY’S GAME & GAMING SECTOR FIGURES
The sector’s figures highlighted at Rimini Fiera from March 16th to 18th
Rimini, 10th March 2016 – According to SAPAR, there are approximately 1,700 companies work on the management
and construction of amusement machines, whereas approximately 5,000 enterprises are involved in the entire sector,
with a workforce of almost 300,000 people involved directly and indirectly.
From Italian Customs and Monopoly Agency figures, it emerges that, in the whole of the country, there is an overall total
of 539,158 slot and amusement machines, distributed in over 95,000 venues. The majority of the units are new slot
machines, of which there are almost 377,500, then there are 111,033 so-called “comma 7” machines (those with no cash
prizes) and 50,654 video lottery terminals.
As well as the amusement machines, there is also the sector of prediction contests. This category includes various types
of venues, from bingo halls to simple state lottery offices. To be precise, 218 bingo halls, 9,935 point of sale for
prediction contests, 33,926 Lotto state lottery offices, 65,303 other lottery points of sale, 453 sports agencies, 4,572
sports betting offices and 36,540 points for numerical games. The regions with the largest number of agencies and
betting points are Lombardy, Lazio, Campania and Emilia-Romagna.
In 2014, the gaming and betting sector had a revenue of 84,485 billion euros, a slight drop on the 84,728 of 2013.
Consequently, there was also a fall in the wins, down from 67,273 to 66,954 billion euros.
The most prominent share of the revenue was from amusement machines, with a total of 25,382 billion euros, followed
by video lottery, with 21,388 euros.
Horse racing bets fell from 813 million euros in 2013 to 682 in 2014, whereas they totalled over a billion euros in 2012.
There has been a rise in the Lotto state lottery (6,629 million euros compared to 6,333) and a slight fall in other lotteries
(9,441 compared to 9,612).
Lombardy is the region in which there is the largest amount of betting, whereas the region with lowest revenue is Valle
d’Aosta. Worthy of note is the fact that Lombardy, with 13,847 billion euros spent in bets, amply doubles the revenue of
regions with more or less similar populations, such as Campania, with 6,579 billion.
At the end of 2015, scratch cards and amusement machines generated a revenue for the Italian government’s coffers of
11.5 billion euros (500 million more than 2014 – source: MEF annual revenue bulletin).
Alongside slot machines and prediction games, sports bets on individual events (done mainly online, on specialized Web
sites) has also met with increasing success in recent years in Italy.
It is calculated that every year in Italy over 170 million euros are placed in bets and 60% of this sum regards the soccer
world, with important international matches. After soccer, another sport on which bets are placed is tennis, which
accounts for 22% of the bets.
The typical sports betting player is male (90%), aged between 18 and 45 and lives mainly on a large city.
Source: Italian Customs and Monopoly Agency