Dinu Patriciu wants 60m euros from sports bets

The sports bet business of billionaire Dinu Patriciu, 1×2 Bet
Café Arena, which he is developing in parallel with Mic.Ro small
store network, wants to gain a 40% slice of the sports bet market
by 2014, with 400 agencies and 2,000 employees, according to the
data provided by the company. The representatives of Mercadia, the
operator of the two networks, for the first time talked to the
press at the launch of the 27th 1×2 Bet Café Arena sports bet
coffee shop on the market, an event Patriciu did not attend though.
“We’ve trained around 500 people so far. Investments in the agency
network will top 40m euros,” stated Dan Ionescu, the right hand of
the Romanian billionaire in the two businesses. The sports bet
business is developed in partnership with UK’s Lottomatica group,
with 3bn-euro turnover worldwide, which does not hold stock in the
domestic operator of coffee shops, though, but collects a
percentage of the Romanian company’s revenues.