13 Jul, 2022
"After March 2022, we spent 0 GEL on TV advertising," said George Mamulaishvili, head of the administration of the Georgian Gambling Association.
According to him, in the first quarter of 2022, before the law on gambling advertising came into force, the sector spent 170 million GEL on television activity, and after March, the integration of advertising in the media was stopped.
"Since March, no company has entered television and will not enter because this is one of the direct restrictions in the advertising law, and in fact, I can say that the advertising sector has been completely damaged, as well as the television sector, because the gaming business is quite large. He was making a contribution. Of course, the television will lose its income, and the sector will pay less profit tax, and the state will be harmed by this," said George Mamulaishvili.
The head of the administration of the Georgian Gambling Association drew a parallel with other countries where gambling advertising was restricted and said that before Ukraine started working on the legalization of gambling, the so-called It was a "black market" and the state was not getting anything, it was losing huge amounts of money.
"The same thing happened in Kenya - they raised taxes and the entire industry became a black market." Although Kenya has reduced the tax today, the legal operator is still reluctant to return to the market because the volatile market does not favor any investor or large company.
Georgia has always been a strong market in the Caucasus region in terms of gambling, the legislation was quite well developed, we had a lot of contracts, they were interested in how it was regulated in Georgia and tried to copy our example. In November 2021, when the authorities decided to introduce the restriction, in fact, the Georgian market collapsed, along with investor interest. This was reflected in all fields that were related to gaming business, including television," said George Mamulaishvili.
For information, according to the research of IPM, in 2021, the representatives of the sector placed a total of 206,421 commercials on television, with a duration of 3,233,739 seconds, and the investment made amounted to 258,159,318 GEL.
