It looks like another unit of Teddy Sagi’s online gaming and trading holding company Playtech PLC (LON:PTEC) is going through a series of large scale layoffs.
Teddy Sagi
After LeapRate’s exclusive report earlier this year about mass firings at Playtech Retail Forex unit Markets.com in a restructuring of its sales, retention and customer service operations, it now appears as if Playtech unit X-Wise is handing out pink slips to a majority of its workers.
X-Wise acts as a digital marketing agency that provides marketing and client acquisition and retention services to online companies which use Playtech software to run their businesses. Israeli business newspaper Globes is reporting that X-Wise has laid off 150 of its approximately 200 staff.
Similar to Markets.com, X-Wise began life as a private Teddy Sagi owned company, but was later sold to publicly traded Playtech.
The X-Wise layoffs seem to stem from a similar reason behind the Markets.com firings – increasingly strict regulation in online industries. In the online gaming sector, there is a regulatory trend toward issuing licenses only for local online gambling, that is only to local operators. As a result, a large proportion of Playtech’s customers who use X-Wise’s services have chosen to focus on a more limited number of countries in which they have a stronger brand name, creating less work for X-Wise.
While Globes reported that as far as is known Playtech does not intend to shut down X-Wise, we noted that X-Wise’s website went down yesterday, and remains down as of the time of writing, as per below.
