Isle of Man-headquartered online gambling operator GVC Holdings today provided information about its divisions’ financial performance during the third quarter of the year and announced that it would pay out a special dividend of €0.1 per share for 2016 in February of the next year.
The gambling company generated net gaming revenue of €221.5 million during the three months ended September 30, 2016, reflecting a 12% increase from the €198.3 million posted for the same period of the previous year.
Total net gaming revenue per day amounted to €2.4 million, up from €2.2 million reported for the third quarter of 2015. Daily net gaming revenue from sports betting offering increased from €860,000 in 2015 to €962,000 in 2016. Sports wagers amounted to €11.4 million per day, up 3% year-on-year from €11.1 million.
Daily casino gaming revenue totaled €1.4 million, up from the amount of €1.3 million reported for the same three months of the previous year.
With a portfolio of ten sports betting and gaming brands, with bwin, Sportingbet, partypoker, and partycasino being few of those, GVC Holdings currently is one of the world’s biggest online gambling operators. In February 2016, the company acquired fellow operator bwin.party to further extend its footprint across regulated jurisdictions, grow its customer base, and diversify its catalog of product offering. The company also provides B2B services to a limited number of gambling operators.
Private investment firm Cerberus Business Finance LLC provided GVC Holdings with a €400-million loan facility in relation to the above-mentioned acquisition deal. As a result, the gambling operator announced that it would take a dividend payment holiday for the current financial year.
In August, GVC Holdings announced that it had signed an agreement with Nomura International to replace its previous financing with a €250-million unsecured loan. The company said that it would use the money together with existing cash resources to repay an outstanding balance of €386.5 million to Cerberus Business Finance.
This, together with the continued positive trading GVC Holdings has been reporting lately, would enable it to pay out €0.1 per share in February 2017, as it said in today’s trading update.
Commenting on the latest announcements, Group CEO Kenneth Alexander said that his company was well-positioned to deliver in the challenging online gambling market and that its strong brands and technology as well as its talented team would help it achieve that.
