After several strategic acquisitions throughout the 12 years he has led Lottomatica, its CEO has gone for the jackpot. Guglielmo Angelozzi (Chieti, Italy, 53 years old) has bet big, and does not seem like an executive who puts everything on the red or black. This week, the Italian company announced the absorption of the Spanish company Cirsa in an operation that will give rise, according to the companies themselves, to the second largest listed group in the world in the gaming sector.
The news caught interested and curious people off guard on September 2. Lottomatica, a leader in Italy, was preparing to acquire the largest company in the Spanish sector for 2.8 billion euros through a share exchange. The resulting entity has a valuation of around 13,000 million, aims for an EBITDA of around 2,000 and anticipates synergies of 115 million per year. Lottomatica shareholders will control just over two-thirds of the capital and Cirsa shareholders, led by Blackstone, will receive 0.66 shares for each of the current shareholders.
The union of the two companies, Angelozzi said in the transaction statement, creates an undisputed leader in Spain and Italy: “Two of the best markets worldwide, complemented by leadership positions in other areas with very high growth potential.” This new stage opens, he added, more avenues for growth, especially in the online field, with the same level of return on capital, but with greater resilience and a low execution risk. “This is a solid recipe,” he assured.
The dish, however, did not impress the Italian markets. On the day of the announcement, Lottomatica shares fell by around 11% and closed 7.6% lower. Angelozzi attributed this setback to a technical and temporal issue linked to this type of operations, in which arbitrageurs pursue a quick, low-risk profit by short selling the shares of the buyer and buying those of the acquired company. For a Reuters analyst, the contraction suggested that the volume of the operation had taken investors by surprise. Be that as it may, the price has not only recovered since then, but has surpassed that of previous days. Those of Cirsa, for their part, flew over the Spanish parquet. At closing that same day they were already worth 18% more, a percentage that reached 40% at the end of this week.
Angelozzi has been at the helm of the current Lottomatica for 12 years and almost two decades in the sector, a not insignificant amount of time to perfect his game and his poker face, sometimes just as valuable in the business world as in a gambling hall. He was born shortly before Christmas Day 1972, in Guardiagrele, a small municipality in the central-eastern region of Abruzzo.
It is not known when he became interested in business, but his university training had little to do with it or its management. In the early nineties he moved to Bologna, in the north of the country, to study computer engineering, a degree that he completed in five years and with an honors thesis. In 1999 he began working as a consultant at Accenture, where he remained until the end of 2002, the same year in which he completed a master's degree in business administration and management at the SDA Bocconi business school. The following year he joined Bain & Company as a manager.
In 2008 he made the leap to the gaming sector and joined IGT. The group, one of the main ones in the sector, was the result of Lottomatica's purchase of the American company GTECH in 2006 and the subsequent merger with IGT, the largest slot machine manufacturer that had diversified its business and from which it took its name. In the six years in which he was in its ranks, Angelozzi served as senior vice president of Machines and Online Gaming, first, and then as executive director of Lottomatica Machines.
After leaving IGT in 2014, he took on the role of CEO of Gamenet, which at the time relied heavily on traditional gaming, slot machines and video lottery. “The main thing we have done has been to diversify the business portfolio,” Angelozzi told Italia Informa in 2019, when this medium awarded him one of its annual awards. They saw that they were outside the segments in which they anticipated the greatest growth, such as online gaming and betting, and they took action on the matter. They also realized that the Italian market was highly fragmented and that there was an opportunity and, in addition, they sought vertical integration in the value chain to achieve more direct management.
He had been in the position for three years when he led the company to the trading floor in 2017. He also led the incorporations of Goldbet and Intralot, which strengthened its position in the world of sports betting. In 2019, the Apollo Global fund reprivatised Gamenet and, a year later, Angelozzi closed the purchase of Lottomatica, IGT's Italian business, which had been its home a few years before. In 2021, Gamenet began to operate under this historic brand due to its weight and recognition in society and in 2022 it added Betflag to its list of acquisitions.
The company returned to the capital market the following year and debuted on the Milan Stock Exchange with a capitalization of 2.2 billion euros. Currently, its market value is around 8,800. The company had a turnover of about 500 million when Angelozzi took over. In 2025, the year in which it became completely public again after the departure of Apollo in the summer, it earned more than 2,200 million and recorded an ebitda close to 860 million and a net profit of almost 370 million. Every bet carries its risk, but Angelozzi seems to have played his numbers well.
