TheChek News Flow

The UK’s new gambling tax ups the odds of M&A

Profits are going to shrink in an industry already leaning towards tie-ups as gaming goes global

Before UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves stood up in parliament to deliver her long-awaited Budget on Wednesday, the government was scolded by the deputy Speaker for leaking its plans over the preceding weeks and months. One upside, at least, was that it gave investors plenty of time to adjust: UK gaming groups’ shares have fallen at least a fifth since a gambling tax raid was first floated in August.

The declines reflect the fact that, however much groups try to mitigate the impact, profits are going to shrink. For an industry already leaning towards tie-ups as gaming goes global and moves online, the new taxes are another reason to get together.

One change will lift taxes on online betting from 15 per cent to 25 per cent in 2027. But the more painful move raises remote gaming duty from 21 per cent to 40 per cent as of April next year. Of the £12.6bn in gross gaming yield the industry generated in the last tax year, nearly £8bn came from remote casino games, growing at a 13 per cent clip. Government estimates suggest its total tax take from gambling will now increase by about a third in the coming years, approaching £5bn by 2030. 

Global gaming giant Flutter, owner of Paddy Power and PokerStars and which gets a third of its revenues from its UK and Ireland businesses, reckons that cost cuts could reduce its total hit by about two-fifths to $495mn over the next two years. Even after its efforts, that’s still a 7 per cent drop in its total forecast Ebitda over that period. 

Entain, home to operations including Ladbrokes and a half-stake in US operator BetMGM, will lose between 6 per cent and 12 per cent of its 2027 ebitda, depending on the scale of offsets that different analysts reckon it can find. 

The more dramatic way to cut costs would be through combinations. It is a trend already under way, with UK lottery operator Allwyn creating a €16bn group in October with a bid for control of Greek group OPAP only weeks after buying PrizePicks, a US fantasy sports platform. In the same month Banijay, owner of France’s Betclic, bought Germany’s leading sports betting site Tipico. 

Small operators make up about a quarter of the UK online gaming market, UBS estimates. These groups will struggle more with the new taxes than their bigger rivals, for whom they could become fodder. Operators with higher debt levels, too, might become vulnerable. Evoke’s shares have fallen by more than a fifth over the last two days, giving it a market capitalisation of £137mn on year-end expected net debt of £1.7bn.

In the world of online gambling, mergers do make sense. Tech platforms can be scaled more easily than physical venues. Reeves dealt the industry a blow this week, but investors should shrug off their losses and start calculating the odds of a comeback.

ESA will develop a programme designed to serve military as well as civil requirements for the first time

Countries in the European Space Agency have agreed for the first time to fund a programme explicitly designed to serve military as well as civilian requirements, as they clinched a record budget increase for the agency’s next three years.

The agency’s proposed European Resilience from Space (ERS) project secured almost all the funding it had sought. It aims to create a military-grade “system of systems” pooling national space assets to deliver secure surveillance, communications and navigation capabilities, as well as earth observation for climate purposes. 

Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said the agency — whose convention drawn up in the 1970s specifies it should develop technology for “peaceful purposes” — had received “a clear defence and security mandate from its member states”.

While this accounted for only about 5 per cent of the ESA budget, the move was “probably the beginning of more to come”, he said.

The shift comes as concerns mount over increasingly assertive activities in space by both China and Russia, while Russia’s war in Ukraine has highlighted the critical importance to national security of communication, navigation and observation capabilities delivered from space.

The ERS proposal secured about €1.2bn of the €1.35bn it had sought at a ministerial summit in Bremen. It will seek a further tranche of about €250mn from European defence ministries in February.

It is the first explicitly military-grade capability being developed by ESA, and was being developed in close collaboration with the European Commission, Aschbacher said. Elements of the programme were oversubscribed, meaning “the mandate is crystal clear”, Aschbacher said.

After two years of discussions and two days of frantic last-minute negotiations, ESA member states agreed in Bremen to increase the agency’s overall budget to €22.1bn, just €200mn shy of the sum it had requested. That amounted to a 32 per cent increase, or 17 per cent in inflation-adjusted terms.

Germany, which has separately pledged to invest €35bn in military space capabilities by 2030, widened its lead as ESA’s biggest funder, and in return secured a pledge that a German astronaut would be the first European to fly with Nasa’s Artemis moon missions. France held onto second place, closely followed by Italy, while Spain overtook the UK to become the agency’s fourth-largest supporter.

Aschbacher said the support from its 23 member states — which also include non-EU countries such as the UK — for almost 100 per cent of the ESA’s budget request was unprecedented.

The agency received strong backing for science missions, such as the search for extraterrestrial life, and for developing commercial rocket and cargo services to space. 

Maxime Puteaux, principal at space consultancy Novaspace, said the agency was “buying time to secure remaining funding” by staggering the fundraising for the military-grade project. While the sums raised at the summit would ensure the project would start next year, it was “still politically fragile”, he said.

“The coming year will be decisive for whether Europe can truly stand up a sovereign, rapid-response intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance constellation,” he added.

Member states also rushed to fund ESA’s European launcher challenge, designed to develop reusable micro and mini rockets capable of eventually evolving to replace Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 6.

Member states pledged more than double the sums requested, as part of a total transportation budget of €4.39bn, or 20 per cent of the total.

Aschbacher’s efforts to promote the development of competitive commercial space companies also received a boost, with member states agreeing to provide some €3.6bn for programmes that could be co-funded with industry.

A key mission for Europe — the Rosalind Franklin mission to send a rover to Mars — was now set for launch in 2028, after Nasa had confirmed this week it would meet its commitment to supply launch services and critical components.

ESA said it would also begin studies on a mission to Enceladus, an icy moon orbiting Saturn, which astrobiologists believe is the most likely place to find evidence of life beyond Earth.

Swiss bank flags five major risks for next year, including economic weakness, resurgence of inflation and renewed US-China tensions

UBS has warned of greater market volatility next year, citing risks ranging from weaker-than-expected artificial intelligence revenue to geopolitical tensions, but the Swiss investment bank remains bullish about Chinese technology shares and gold.

UBS identified five major market risks for next year: economic weakness, a resurgence of inflation, government debts, renewed US-China conflicts, and disappointing returns from AI after three years of heavy investment.

“One point that we can be very sure of is that the volatility will be bigger,” said Hu Yifan, regional chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, at a press conference on Thursday. While global investments in AI would continue, markets were increasingly questioning how much profit such spending could generate, Hu added.

Since last year, some US market heavyweights like Michael Burry have warned of a potential AI bubble. Nvidia’s slumping shares deepened the concerns.

UBS, however, believed the AI boom differed from the dot-com era. Eva Lee Chi-wing, head of Greater China equities at UBS, said global tech giants were now better positioned to withstand shocks, given their strong cash flows and limited reliance on debt to fund investments.

With Chinese tech companies leading in AI applications, Lee estimated earnings growth of up to 37 per cent next year, adding that Chinese tech stocks “are still not expensive”.

Following the Hang Seng Tech Index’s 29 per cent surge this year, UBS set a target level of 7,100 by the end of 2026, indicating a nearly 27 per cent jump from Thursday’s close of 5,598. For the broader market, UBS projected the MSCI China Index could reach 100 next year, about 18.7 per cent higher than Wednesday’s level of 84.27.

Hu said higher risks also brought higher returns, urging investors to further diversify their portfolios to capture opportunities.

Beyond equities, UBS recommended allocating at least 5 per cent of portfolios to gold as it expected the metal to hit as high as US$4,900 per ounce.

Meanwhile, global fund managers were expected to move more money into Asia next year amid a weakening US dollar and an AI investment upcycle that would likely run for years, said Matthew Quaife, global head of multi-asset investment management at Fidelity International.

China increasingly resembled the US market in terms of technological progress and innovation, and the gap between the two countries was rapidly narrowing – yet valuations of Chinese tech companies were still low, according to Niamh Brodie-Machura, chief investment officer for equities at Fidelity International.

“We expect to see the rising adoption of technology and artificial intelligence to begin to benefit the broader economy,” Brodie-Machura added.

Crypto Winter Will Be Different This Time

Winter is coming, not just in the seasons but in the crypto market. If the current downturn turns into another crypto winter, it will have a bigger impact on the mainstream financial system than it has in the past.

Bitcoin has fallen 30% in less than two months and is down for the year, while other cryptocurrencies have crashed by much more. This has occurred despite the most crypto-friendly regulatory environment ever. What’s become clear is that instead of building an alternate financial system, the crypto industry used its newfound freedom to go crazy.

As my colleague Yueqi Yang has written, that meant memecoins on the stock market, nearly infinite leverage on some exchanges, and crypto-driven prediction markets that made betting on the end of the government shutdown a daily pastime. You may not have noticed amid the carnage, but this week an exchange-traded fund that tracks dogecoin debuted on the New York Stock Exchange (it’s actually up by a few pennies).

Some of this is just crypto being crypto. The thing to watch this year, and maybe the riskiest development in crypto, has been the rise of stablecoins. These cryptocurrencies, which are pegged to the dollar, are the closest thing to an alternate financial system. The most boring part of crypto got blessed with a friendly new law dubbed the Genius Act, giving it instant credibility.

That’s led to a bunch of new stablecoin announcements and increased use, especially overseas. This week Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later provider, said it would launch a stablecoin called KlarnaUSD next year. They are joining payments company Western Union and cloud company Cloudflare in creating new offerings. Stablecoins are currently dominated by Circle and Tether, which together have a market cap of roughly $250 billion.

Before we delve further into stablecoins, though, it’s worth looking more into the current meltdown. Ground zero for the sell-off is a Singapore-based crypto exchange, Hyperliquid, that handles $13 billion in trades a day with 11 employees and offers staggering amounts of leverage. It was home to a $10 billion liquidation in October that ricocheted across markets. Hyperliquid also has a stablecoin.

On the traditional stock exchanges, crypto treasury stocks—listed companies stuffed with crypto—are among the biggest losers. Until recently, the euphoria in crypto meant these stocks traded at a premium to their crypto holdings. Investors decided that paying $2 for every $1 of crypto was a good idea. The companies logically issued stock or borrowed money to buy more crypto, driving up prices.

This trade has unwound painfully, and now the crypto treasury companies are trading at a discount to their holdings. The logical move for them is to sell crypto and buy back their shares. That cycle of selling can drive down prices.

All that is a reminder that stablecoins’ promise of zero volatility warrants some skepticism.

Because they are more closely linked to the financial system than any other form of crypto, stablecoins require more scrutiny and caution. They are also closer to real money than anything else in crypto because they meet one crucial criteria of money–they are a store of value. Dogecoin can’t say that.

Stablecoins keep their 1:1 peg against the dollar by holding safe assets such as short-term Treasurys, bank deposits and money market funds. That’s legit, and is required by the stablecoin law. It is ironic that stablecoins rely on traditional financial tools, which much of crypto disdains, to maintain their stability.

History has shown it’s easier to promise stability than to deliver it. Just this month, a small, fringe stablecoin blew up, wiping out around $200 million. The stablecoin, run by a company called Stream Finance, promised a yield of around 18% but collapsed after losing $93 million.

Stream Finance realized quickly that the promise of stability has a dark side—the bank run. While the company’s stablecoin operates differently than the major ones, the investor reaction is the same. It’s one thing to lose money on a risky investment. It’s another to lose your savings. That invites panic, frantic withdrawals and crashes, and these have happened in every asset that promises to give people their money back in full.

“There has been a run, there will be a run, money market funds, repos, you name it, there will be a run,” said Lee Reiners, a fellow at the Duke Financial Economics Center and a former Federal Reserve official.

But memories are short, especially in crypto. When Silicon Valley Bank failed in 2023, one of the biggest casualties was Circle, the dominant stablecoin in the U.S. When Circle announced it had $3.3 billion of assets in SVB, it suffered its own bank run, and its stablecoin fell to 88 cents on the dollar. It was saved when regulators said the federal government would make all deposits at SVB whole.

Reiners points out that SVB failed because its supersafe Treasury holdings lost value when interest rates rose. “This is the nature of those things—you don’t know how the contagion will play out,” he said.

The Genius Act, which has yet to take effect, makes it seem that stablecoins have official backing, and that has spurred more use of them, especially overseas in countries where people want access to dollars because of unstable currencies or capital controls. Stablecoins are the easiest way to obtain and move dollars in places like Argentina and Turkey, but that makes stability even more critical.

Their broader use also creates more ways for a stablecoin crisis to emerge and spread across the globe. It is here that the links to the traditional financial system matter. If investors dump their stablecoins, as they did with Circle, the companies sell the assets that back them, potentially causing turmoil in Treasurys, money markets and the like.

As I said, memories are short. A crack in a money market fund led to one of the darkest moments of the 2008 global financial crisis. Drama in the Treasury market has caused several crises.

Stablecoins add another source of unpredictable risk to the financial system. In retrospect, everyone will say we should have seen it coming.