WynnBet To Scale Down US Operations

WynnBet the sports betting arm of Wynn Resorts under the control of subsidiary Wynn Interactive have announced they are pulling the plug in several US states citing over regulation and also the huge amounts of marketing spend needed to compete.

The company said when announcing that it would close operations in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia that the cost of customer acquisition was too high.

Indeed in West Virginia WynnBet has only been operating for a couple of months but now decided to leave that market also.

The announcement came as Wynn Resorts reported higher than expected results in its US and Macau casino operations, in reporting the results Wynn Resorts chief financial officer, Julie Cameron-Doe, said on the closures “there are higher and better uses of capital deployment for shareholders.”

She went on to say: “While we believe in the long-term prospects of igaming, the dearth of igaming legislation and the presence of numerous other investment opportunities available to us around the globe have led us to the decision to curtail our capital investment in WynnBET to focus primarily on those states where we maintain a physical presence.”

WynnBet will continue its sports betting operations in Nevada and Massachusetts and will keep under review those in New York and Michigan.

Both market leaders DraftKings and BetMGM have found it expensive to acquire customers with huge marketing spend and it seems that Wynn Resorts see the cost over excessive and many analysts see this as a scale down business for the company and focus once more on the bricks and mortar operations they are experienced in.