The world’s largest publicly traded online gambling firm, bwin.party digital entertainment plc, has shown signs of improvement after a year of revenue decline. Last Thursday, it released its interim report for the third quarter of this year, stating a revenue increase of 2 percent.
The casino and bingo revenues combined decreased by €60.6 million compared to last year. As the financial gains from poker and casino were low, the sportsbook betting and specifically the FIFA World Cup betting contributed for the 11% profit increase.
The new Combi+ feature has also added a positive effect on the sportsbook statistics.
Other financial curves of bwin.party such as Kalixa, World Poker Tour and its network services have shown an impressive increase of over 60%. That was not the case for poker revenue, which represented just 12% of the company’s revenue after it fell down by one-fourth compared to the one posted last year.
Despite this visible decline, the CFO of bwin.party stated that poker revenue has been rising since July. The CFO also shared that the company is still going to put effort in rejuvenating this sector. Mr. Weigold predicted a continuous decline for 2015. He said this would happen thanks to the new tax laws for poker in France. These new regulations will be implemented on the 1st of July 2015 and are expected to lower poker profits by half a million each year.
The Q3 interim report showed that mobile gaming applications take up to 23% of bwin.party’s revenue with less than 8% of that being from poker app usage. That means poker applications have not yet gained enough recognition from mobile users. The report also states a decrease in the number of daily player logins, little over 10% and the same amount decrease in active play time.
The account registrations which had charge-ups with real money fell down as well. The overall revenue from gaming fell by 1% to less than €170 million. The company made it clear that it would have had an increase in revenue by one percent if it was not pushed to leave the gambling market of Greece.
The Chief Executive Officer of bwin.party commented that the company was changing its strategy in the online gambling market in the state of New Jersey. It has become the highest earning operator after its partnership with casino Borgata. Mr. Norbert Teufelberger said the company had expected that New Jersey’s gambling market would be bigger and it will therefore have to spend less on advertising and marketing.
During the past week, bwin.party’s shares have increased and experts say that shareholders may now consider to sell their shares while they have the opportunity, or there may be no other similar chance in the future. eGaming Review representative also stated that the momentary increase of share prizes is nothing but ‘false hope’. However, only time will tell whether these statements are correct or simply subjective comments.
