Another Online Gambling Firm to Move Off British Shore

The world's largest betting exchange, Betfair have already declared that it would go after their rivals Ladbrokes and William Hill as the two moved its business to Gibraltar to lessen its tax burden.

Betfair was has been up for more than a decade and was founded by a one – time professional gambler Andrew Black and former JP Morgan. Derivatives trader Ed Wray stated that they're looking forward to save 20 million pounds per year as a result of which will see its wagering exchange operate under Gibraltar license beginning Wednesday.

Betfair is presently paying 15 percent tax on gross profit from wagering, but this will drop to 1 percent after they move in Gibraltar as the tax rate for betting exchange operations there is 1% turnover with the gaming tax capped at GPB425,000 annually. For online casino sites, the gaming tax is at 1% of the gross product with similar maximum cap as fixed – odds betting.

CEO David Yu said in a conference call with reporters that Betfair was also finding for ways to avoid the so – called “double taxation” which it is presently facing under UK tax regulations. He also commented that “As a global, technology-led betting operator, our new operational base in Ireland and the change to our licensing structure provides us with increased flexibility. It allocates to be more efficient by providing first class technical equipments on their locations, to serve our customers better and to compete on the same basis as the majority of operators in the UK online betting market.”

The company intends to go on employing on nearly 1200 people at its offices in the UK but declared to move of key technical equipment and 120 staff to new offices in Dublin and Gibraltar as part of a broader reorganizing. New offices will operate in parallel to the existing ones but will be combined in 2012.

The third quarter results of Betfair showed a 20.5 % drop in poker revenues summing to GBP5.2 million, sports betting revenues up by 8.6% amounting to GBP56.6 millions, games up to 8.2 percent to GBP14.3 million and a total revenue results of GBP77.0 million portraying an increase of 6.2 percent last year on the same period.

Giving his comment on the third quarter performance and present trading, Betfair's CEO David Yu said that “We are pleased with the growth we achieved in the third quarter, especially from football and Games. Lower cost per acquisition resulted from its marketing efficiency for this quarter whilst also showing strong growth in active customer numbers.. We have made a good start to Q4. Improvements followed by a succesful migration of new technology infrastructure to their new data center in Ireland, we are rolling out a planned series of major improvements to our Sports betting product which will help to drive revenue growth in Q4 and into FY12. We remain confident that we will deliver an outcome for the current financial year within the range of market expectations.”

    * This article is summarized from the articles featuring the said move of BetFair to Gibraltar which can be found at the official website of realbusiness.co.uk, calvinayre.com and onlinecasinosuite.com