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How The Philippines’ Largest Online Gaming Operator Wagered All And Won
This story appears in the August 2026 issue of Forbes Asia. Subscribe to Forbes Asia The pandemic forced DigiPlus Interactive chairman Eusebio Tanco to place his chips on offering bingo online. Now with rivals circling, he’s upping his bet with a new superapp and overseas expansion. This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Philippines’ Richest 2026. See the full list here .
B ack in January 2022, as the Philippines hit a record daily Covid-19 case count, Eusebio Tanco, chairman of gaming company DigiPlusInteractive, pushed his chips into place. The company, then called Leisure & Resorts World, had racked up over 2 billion pesos ($39 million at the time) in net losses following two years of lockdowns that had all but shuttered its 163 bingo halls and gaming cafes across the archipelago.
“We needed to do something,” recalls Tanco, 76, sporting his trademark sneakers and blue jeans in an exclusive interview at his office in the Makati financial district. He launched BingoPlus, an interactive gaming platform built from scratch, to complement the idle bingo slot machines. “The pandemic accelerated our move to go online,” he says.
The pivot drove the company’s recovery—DigiPlus posted a modest 600.7 million pesos ($9.8 million) in net income in 2022—and laid the foundation for a new way of doing business. Over the next three years, the company extended its online offerings in the Philippines to include sports betting and casino games like slots and live dealer games. Helped by the explosive adoption of mobile wallets during the pandemic, the total number of registered users rose exponentially, hitting 40 million last year.
In 2024, DigiPlus became the country’s biggest online gaming outfit by gross gaming revenue (GGR) , a key industry metric that reflects the total amount of money wagered minus the winnings paid out to players. It retained that status in 2025 with record sales of 83.1 billion pesos ($1.3 billion)—up 12% from the previous year—contributing over a fifth of the country’s GGR of 396 billion pesos, according to data from regulator Philippine Amusement and Gaming. “We didn’t expect it to become that big that quickly,” acknowledges Tanco, who’s called Yosi (pronounced Yoh-see), short for Eusebio, by his friends and business associates.
With his gaming sites, BingoPlus, ArenaPlus and GameZone, now household names in the Philippines, he’s looking to leverage that success. Expanding overseas, investing in a bricks-and-mortar casino and developing a superapp that will offer the gamut from e-commerce to insurance, are all on the table. “These will shape what DigiPlus can become in the future, which can go beyond gaming and entertainment,” says Tanco.
“We needed to do something. The pandemic accelerated our move to go online.”
This next pivot comes at a time when DigiPlus’ inroads into online betting have rivals circling. In July, the betting sites of homegrown casino groups, ports billionaire Enrique Razon Jr. ’s Bloomberry Resorts and property-to-liquor tycoon Andrew Tan ’s Newport World Resorts, went live. Two months earlier, Okada Manila, owned and operated by a subsidiary of Japan’s Universal Entertainment, had launched its digital platform Okada Play. The sector has also drawn property and airline tycoon Lance Gokongwei , who in June invested 2 billion pesos of his personal fortune into Pasig City-based PhilWeb, which builds and manages gaming platforms, operates physical gaming stations and distributes gaming content.
It’s not just rivals who are closing in, so are regulators. Last year, the Philippine central bank, bowing to public concerns about online gambling, ordered the country’s financial institutions and e-wallet operators to remove all links to gaming sites from their platforms. Now online punters can only log in to a gaming site directly if they want to play. Earlier, in July 2024, the government had cracked down on offshore gambling firms that had proliferated with several operating without a license.
The removal of gaming apps in e-wallets, which took effect last August, hit the industry’s gross gaming revenue, which fell by more than a third in the six months until December. The ban also took a toll on the company’s shares, which have halved from a year ago, impacting Tanco’s fortune. He appears on the Philippines’ Rich List at No. 20 with a net worth of $735 million.
To mitigate the effects of the ban, Tanco more than doubled gaming content by introducing variants of Blackjack and Baccarat and local games such as Pinoy Drop Ball, a digital version of the Filipino carnival game. He also expanded Digiplus’ payment-partner network, which now includes Banktech Australia’s Pay&Go, PayPal and Filipino boxing icon Manny Pacquiao’s e-wallet app, MannyPay. DigiPlus also tapped Pacquiao as brand ambassador for both its GameZone platform, where customers can play card and casino games against real opponents, and ArenaPlus, a sports-betting site that streams local and international sports events.
Simultaneously, it launched a marketing campaign to lure back customers who previously had accessed its platform through mobile wallets such as GCash and PayMaya, in particular high value users, who accounted for a fifth of DigiPlus users, but contributed 80% of revenue before the ban. The measures are bearing fruit, says the company, which projects a return to pre-ban monthly revenue levels within the year.
Not everyone is as optimistic. “I do not think they can hit pre-delinking levels by the end of the year. That’s just me being conservative after seeing flat quarter-on-quarter revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026,” says Richard Laneda, an analyst at Pasig City-based COL Financial, by email. While “management’s push to increase average revenue per user and not go for market share may result in a more gradual recovery in revenues,” he adds, “they will be able to maintain profitability in a very competitive environment.”
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