Operator News
Uruguay – Enjoy investment plans underway in Uruguay
By Phil - 1 May 2019
Enjoy’s US$118m investment plan for the next two years will provide for the construction of three new hotel towers in Punta del Este, attract customers from the United States and Europe, and cover major building work for the municipal casinos in Chile according to company President, Javier Martínez.
The executive said in a statement to Diario Financiero that all the financial restructuring carried out by the group is now complete and they now have the financing necessary for the new projects that will be carried out over the next two years.
When it comes to the Hotel Enjoy de Punta del Este, Martínez said that part of the restructuring of car parking is already complete, room renovation had been carried out and that the company has built a new swimming pool. However the building of the new towers will not begin this year.
Martínez said that casino visitor numbers had been impacted by the current economic downturn in both Brazil and Argentina. However, the company was strengthening its plans to attract VIP players to the casino from Europe and the United States. According to Martinez, now that the tender over the municipal licences had been resolved the company will invest in the newly licensed casinos. Enjoy won the four tenders in which they competed, Viña del Mar, Pucón, Coquimbo and Puerto Varas and was able to increase the duration of the licenses from seven to fourteen years.
While the company was working on building work to meet with the new licence requirements it may ask for more time for extensions to complete work on new venues in some cases he said. While in Viña del Mar and Coquimbo the changes are focused on the interior of the casinos, in Pucón and Puerto Varas construction work will be more extensive, as that they must build new infrastructure.
In August 2017, US based private equity firm Advent International announced that it had signed an agreement with Enjoy. Advent announced plans to invest as much as US$118m in the casinos in Coquimbo, Viña del Mar, Pucón and Puerto Varas in the next two to three years, according to a presentation to investors earlier this month.
