Gaming industry consolidation
The latest troubles with Donald Trump's casino empire may lead to more consolidation in the gaming industry. A number of gaming company mergers and acquisitions have taken place in the past few years, as this high cash-flow business.
The biggest mergers happened a few years ago. They included:
- In 1999, Park Place Entertainment bought our Caesars
- In 2000, MGM Grand bought out the Mirage group, which owned Mirage, Bellagio and Treasure Island casino, and properties in Mississippi
- In 2001, Park Place bought out the Claridge Casino in New Jersey
More recently, lesser comnpetitors have joined in the merger game:
- Boyd Gaming Corp. is buying Coast Casino for around $1.3 billion., Founded in 1941, Boyd Gaming owes a variety of casinos in the United States, including the Borgata in Atlantic City, the Stardust and Sam's Town in Las Vegas, and gambling operation sin Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, and Louisiana. Recently, Boyd also agreed to buy Harrah's Shreveport, Louisiana casino. Coast Casino owns four Las Vegas casinos, the most well-known being the Barbary Coast.
- Harrah's, the #3 casino company in the world, has agreed to acquire Horseshoe Gaming for $1.4 billion. Harrah's owns and/or operates 25 casinos in 13 US states, under the names Harrah's, Harveys, Players, Showboat, and Rio. Horseshoe owns casinos in Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as a riverboat casino in Indiana.
- Meanwhile, key Australian gambling players Tabcorp and UniTAB are both seeking to buy out rival TAB Limited for bid of around $2 billion (Australian). Tabcorp claims to be the fifth largest gambling company in eth world, after its recent merger with Jupiters, another Australian company. These companies have confusing similar names because they were established by provincial gaming authorities, and then were spun off as independent companies. All of the Australian companies are big into online sports betting as well as casinos and conventional betting.
Conventional gambling companies had it easy once in the US, They had to build in Nevada or Atlantic City, and the customers were limited to traveling to those locations. With states setting up casinos and riverboats all the time, and new Indian reservations being granted licenses every year, weaker companies are starting to fall. All the leaders now have widespread assets, and some are working with Indian reservations to set up casinos.
But the biggest challenge is on the Internet. All it requires is a link and a credit card. While online gambling is banned in the US, it is easily available overseas. Both anti-gambling interests and the gaming industry itself are pressuring congress to pass new laws that ban money transfers and credit card use for online gambling. Nevertheless, there are always ways to set up third-party transactions to avoid any ban.
In fact, MGM Mirage last year walked away from a planned offshore gambling operation in the Isle of Man in Britain. But with online gaming legal in Canada, the UK, Australia, and several dozen other countries, enforcement is going to be very difficult. All told there are over 900 gambling portals online that are run by legitimate businesses.
Given that anyone under 40 now interacts with the world in great measure through the Internet, major online gambling is inevitable in the US. The biggest companies, Caesars Entertainment (formerly Park Place), MGM Mirage, and Harrah's, hope to big enough to protect themselves against the eedisruptions faced by the industry.
4:47:14 PM 
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