Chilean operator was down 16.4 per cent over the first half of the year
Enjoy has laid the blame for its deteriorating financial performance on the growth of online betting operating outside Chile’s regulatory framework, in a diagnosis included alongside its first-half 2026 results — landing at a genuinely difficult moment for the operator, which is simultaneously navigating a prolonged vacancy at the top of the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ) and an ongoing collusion investigation targeting the sector’s major players.
Enjoy was direct in its assessment: the sustained growth of betting houses and online platforms currently operating outside a specific Chilean regulatory framework, alongside unregulated slot machine halls in various cities, has captured significant revenue from the broader gaming and betting market. The company said this has accelerated a shift in consumer habits toward remote and alternative gaming formats, turning these platforms into serious competition for traditional physical casinos — competition landing on top of an industry that was already dealing with a sustained decline in both revenue and foot traffic since Chile’s 2019 social unrest and the pandemic.
Enjoy’s ordinary income for the first half of 2026 reached $22.614bn pesos, down 16.4 per cent from $27.053bn in the same period of 2025. The decline was driven primarily by the gaming business itself, which fell from $23.433bn to $19.260bn, with food and beverage, hospitality and entertainment revenue also slipping from $1.505bn to $1.392bn, and other income down from $2.115bn to $1.962bn.
Facing that contraction, Enjoy moved to control spending: cost of sales fell 19.2 per cent, from $21.218bn to $17.137bn, while administrative expenses dropped 20.1 per cent to $4.933bn, a reduction the company attributed mainly to fewer advertising events and marketing activities. That discipline was enough to lift EBITDA to $4.702bn, up 2.8 per cent from $4.573bn a year earlier — but it wasn’t enough to offset the top-line decline further down the income statement. Enjoy posted a net loss attributable to controlling shareholders of $36.105bn, reversing a $39.567bn profit in the same period last year.
Enjoy’s diagnosis lines up closely with the broader industry picture already emerging from SCJ data and other operators — physical casino visits down roughly 30 per cent and gross revenue down 20 per cent over seven years — but its own results put a sharper, company-specific number on that trend. It also arrives as Enjoy continues reducing its own physical footprint (having already relinquished four casino concessions, including the recent Los Ángeles filing), even as the operator argues its core problem isn’t operational execution but a structural one: online competitors operating without the licensing costs, tax obligations or oversight Enjoy itself is subject to. That framing puts Enjoy’s results squarely behind the same push coming from casino associations and even former regulators — that finalising Chile’s online betting framework isn’t just a policy question, but the mechanism that would let incumbent land-based operators compete against online rivals on equal terms rather than absorbing losses to structurally uneven competition indefinitely.