300 Betcris Employees To Work From Home
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has forced Betcris, one of the leading game operators in Latin America, to tell its employees to work from home. This decision is apparently one of many implemented by the games operator to protect its workers and maintain recommendations for social distancing during this uncertain time. The decision to transition to this type of work was made in conjunction with the current public health recommendations.
Betcris is encouraging hundreds of its employees to stay home as a means of self-protection from COVID-19. ©Retha Ferguson/Pexels
Betcris is Playing It Safe
In addition to switching to a work-from-home model for 300 of its employees, Betcris is also taking a number of protective measures as the coronavirus outbreak rages on. After disinfecting company headquarters in Costa Rica, Betcris executives sent a company-wide memo telling their branch offices to do the same.
Additionally, the company will be taking on some of the more nitty-gritty details of a transition to working from home. For one example, the company plans to internally discuss and address the protection of private data. Additionally, they will work to ensure that this shift will remain profitable, and will work to protect the mental health of their employees.
“Directors should show signs of improvement at making a decision about efficiency by defining and observing explicit objectives instead of utilizing the intermediary of office participation. Workers should receive unprecedented discipline with regards to partitioning their day into profound work, office correspondences, individual time and family life.”– Spokesperson, Betcris
Betcris: At The Cutting Edge of Business During Coronavirus
The decision to transition hundreds of its employees to a remote working model comes just a short time after Betcris executives unfurled their creative plan to keep sports betting lucrative, even in a time when few live sports matches are continuing to occur.
According to company spokespeople, the company is now featuring increasingly unusual events as opportunities to place sports bets. This will range from current events — candidates likely to win in the US presidential primary, for example — to unusual sports like ping pong and simulated games of football, soccer, or basketball.
One of the most interesting decisions made by Betcris on this front was to offer its users to bet on whether or not certain sporting events would actually happen. A recent bet had gamblers deciding if they thought the 2020 Olympics would continue to go ahead on July 24 as planned (spoiler: the Olympics have been postponed).
A Win for Sports Betting Amid the Chaos?
While Betcris executives maintain confidence that their new approach to sports betting will continue to be lucrative for their company, other sports betting companies like DraftKings are also maintaining that they are coming up with new and engaging business ideas for their users.
What Will Be the Actual Impact of COVID-19 On the Gambling Market?
As of yet, the Latin American market has not yet unveiled the numbers to indicate how the pandemic has impacted their businesses, though there have no doubt been some ripples: casinos in Latin American countries have closed, with a big announcement coming from the governments of Cancún and Colombia recently.
Still, it could be telling that recent reports from Europe and its gaming market have demonstrated an interesting range of profits and losses during this time. Predictably, companies without a robust iGaming component have severely struggled.
According to this report, companies like La Française des Jeux (FDJ), based in France, and Germany’s Gauselmann have withered under the effects of COVID-19. For both businesses, the shuttering of their brick-and-mortar facilities means massive losses, and neither one can turn to rely heavily on an established iGaming platform.
Simultaneously, Malta-based company Catena Media actually reported growth in the first two months of 2020: a 5.7% increase from the year before. According to a company spokesperson, this upward trend is anticipated to continue as the pandemic rages on. Catena Media, however, is seen as an outlier for the larger, more ominous trend.
Latin America and COVID: Mexico’s Reluctance
While countries across Latin America have worked to contain and combat the extremely contagious coronavirus, Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known as AMLO), has made clear that he prefers a business as usual approach to the pandemic — a technique frowned upon by most public health officials.
As such, AMLO is unlikely to close businesses based in Mexico or to encourage them to take the same cautious approach as Betcris and tell employees to work from home. As recently as March 20, President Obrador was continuing to personally attend major rallies and events, shaking hands and kissing babies as politicians have done in more normal times.
According to Obrador, closing down public life would not only harm the country’s poor, but also weigh heavily on the minds and hearts of Mexico’s citizens. While this is a rather sympathetic approach, public health experts have made clear that this is a worrying approach to a public health crisis unseen since the Spanish Flu of 1919.
