Good morning and welcome. This morning we have the latest results from Playtech and XLMedia, where the refocusing of the company towards sports affiliate marketing continues apace and the acquisition of BlueClaw also brings further SEO and PPC expertise. We also have further reaction to Tuesday’s news on DraftKings and Entain and the latest news from the SBC Summit in Barcelona which, coincidentally, was kicked off with a keynote from Entain CEO Jette Nygaard-Anderson who, unsurprisingly, opted not to take questions from the floor.

Playtech H1

The top line 

• Revenues were down 4% YoY to €457.4m, AEBITDA was up 14% on constant currency to €124.1m and adjusted post-tax profits were up 1460% to €54.6m. 

• Retail closures in Italy were offset by 95% revenue growth to €123.4m and 118% EBITDA growth to €51.6m for Snaitech. 

• On the B2B front revenues were up 16% to €267.2m with Latin America growing strongly in Mexico with Caliente and WPlay in Colombia. Revenues from the Americas grew 106% YoY to €46.4m.

• In the US Playtech launched Parx Casino in Michigan and signed new partnerships with Scientific Games and Novomatic and progressing with its bet365 and BetMGM partnerships in New Jersey.

New and old combine: CEO Mor Weizer was clear that “the Americas” would be the source of major new growth in the coming years and the “number 1 priority” for the group. Mexico is its main market in the region currently and Colombia is performing well. It is highly optimistic about Brazil following its agreement signed last year with Galera Bet. The group also highlighted the “significant unrealised gains of €299.9m” it had recorded in relation to call options on its B2B agreements in Colombia and Mexico. 

Italy meanwhile was “a significantly underpenetrated online market at just 20%, compared with 40% in the UK,” Weizer said. Retail outlets reopened in June and were still ~20% below 2019 levels, but online EBITDA was “higher than 2019 and 2020” and there was still room for “double-digit growth,” he added. 

Timing for Italian licence renewals was still uncertain, CFO Andrew Smith said they were “getting moved around all the time, the earliest is for the end of next year and maybe even 2023.”

America, America: Weizer was bullish on the US market and illustrated his optimism with a visual that forecast a B2B market worth $3bn for Playtech. Long term, B2B revenues for OSB could be worth $825m, igaming $1.8bn and platform (PAM) $390m on revenue shares of 10-15% and 3-5% for PAM. Asked how this compared with the stated aims of the leading brands to own as much of their tech stack as possible, Weizer said Playetch was working to sign deals across all “three tiers” of operators. 

The US market will also become fragmented “because more states will regulate and a lot more casinos and other operators will come in” that have no wish to operate those functions in house. Operators that are focused on a limited number of states will expand and the “long term view is that third party providers can take share. Of course the market is dominated by DraftKings, FanDuel and others but over time it will fragment as we’ve seen in other markets.”

Everything everything: Weizer said Playetch would continue to focus on generating revenues from regulated markets and while Asia was not important as in the past, the countries it operated in were stable and cash generative. The group expects to be certified for US sports betting in a number of states and now operates three live casino studios in the  US, one in Peru and is building one in the Netherlands as part of its partnership with Holland Casino. Weizer said: “We believe we have everything we need even if we are always looking to extend that. We’re strongly positioned in OSB and SSBTs (for land-based betting), IMS for igaming and live casino. We can always refine and sharpen around the edges but the opportunity is there with an entire market up for grabs.” 

XLMedia

The top line

• Revenue was up 16% YoY to $32.2m while adjusted EBITDA rose 29% YoY to $6.6m. Maintain guidance of between $65-$70m for FY.

• Business mix shows sports at 37% of total revenues, up from 22%, casino at 42% (down from 61%) and finance at 21% (down from 17%)

• The company has announced the acquisition of Blue Claw, an SEO and PPC agency, for £1.8m.

More meat in the claw: XLMedia recently enhanced its positioning in the U.S. via the $24m acquisition of Saturday Football Inc, the publisher of a number of Southeastern conference-focused College football sites. During the half, XL also bought up the Sports Betting Dime assets in March for $26m ($11m upfront), a deal which occasioned a $33.5m fund raise. Today’s acquisition of BlueClaw, an SEO specialist, looks designed to help rectify XLMedia’s long standing issues with the Google algorithm which has previously punished its bigger casino-focused sites. The company said the Leeds, UK-based firm would bring with its experience in “digital best-practice.” 

Wheel turns: In casino, revenues fell back by an unspecified amount to $12.5m. The company said it was now focusing on driving revenues from a smaller number of profitable sites, hoping these will be more sustainable revenues. It is also working on plans to evolve its sites into multi-territory offerings rather than the previous strategy of single country-focused sites. “We continue to believe in the high quality of our premium casino assets relative to peers,” the statement added.

DraftKings and Entain analyst reaction

Dust settles: Analyst opinion has already coalesced around the idea that the DraftKings bid for Entain will end up with DraftKings adding international exposure to its offering and MG gaining the half of betMGM that it has previously indicated it desires.

“In our view, the most likely outcome is for DKNG to acquire the non-US business and arrange a sale/tech agreement with MGM,” said the team at Macquarie. “Clearly, this would strengthen MGM (a DraftKings US competitor), but we believe DraftKings is inherently confident in its strategy/tech (particularly after the Golden Nugget Online Gaming acquisition), and that it would prefer to acquire Entain at what we believe is a highly accretive price.”

Paper trail: Yet, for such a preferred outcome to prevail depends on a number of puzzle pieces falling into place. First, whether such a trech deal would be optimal for MGM. Wells Fargo analysts suggest MGM would need to stump up ~$5bn for the half of BetMGM it doesn’t already own. Given MGM’s $11bn+ cash pile, this would clearly be no block. However, the paper element of the deal for Entain’s shareholders might be more of an issue. Of the £28 a share offer, only 630p or less than a fifth would be in cash. DraftKings paper may be highly rated, but the company is not yet profitable and its record on M&A isn’t entirely positive (look at the fortunes of the B2B business that came with the SBTech acquisition).

Sportsbet investor day 

Easy does it: Sportsbet accounts for just over 50% of the online sports betting market in Australia and with the Beteasy integration complete, H1 revenues rose 56% and EBITDA was up a whopping 192% vs. 2019. Management said the progress was down to a combination of customer and product mix (‘Same game multis’, ‘Bet with mates’) and pricing accuracy that enabled it to generate strong gross win and net revenues.

(Slightly) higher stakes: The group is focused on recreational players, but CEO Berni Evans said it had also benefited strongly from the online redirect of generally older, not tech-savvy and more racing-focused retail customers during the pandemic lockdowns, which has led to strong retention levels of the new higher staking customers. 

Added Evans: “We’re a mass market brand, but even cohorts we thought would be resistant to a young dynamic brand like Sportsbet are open: retail customers who weren't responsive pre-pandemic have gone online and now love the product.” Asked how much of its business was now generated by higher staking players, Evans said he was happy with the mix but Sportsbet wasn’t planning on “making inroads in the super VIP category, we’re not sure how big it is and it’s quite volatile.” 

House party: In terms of its tech stack and the role of third parties, Chan said the group’s progress was down to it being “customer obsessed” and first and foremost prioritising the user experience. Head of growth Doug Brown said “owning the tech stack and knowledge is very important and our highly personalised marketing allows us to innovate and create some great products. These are byproducts of us owning our tech stack and that will continue.”

Positive regs: Asked about industry regulations that had been “quite negative” in recent years (no live betting or online casino), Evans said he would qualify the use of the term “negative” because “regulatory evolution is positive for a maturing market”. 

“We don’t anticipate any positive changes to regulations, we’re fine with that and are bullish about the opportunities ahead of us. We don’t think of it as being negative: we welcome good regulation, if it raises the bar in terms of customer protection and makes it more consistent across the market then we welcome it. We’ve got a good track record of working unilaterally ahead of regulations, it’s the right thing to do.” 

SBC Summit Day 1

No comment of the day: Jette Nygaard-Anderson may well have been, as she said quipped at the beginning of her opening keynote in Barcelona yesterday, the :”lady of the moment” but that didn;lt mean she would be taking questions. Instead, she produced a shortened carbon copy of the recent investor day presentation, talking about improving the player experience and about the potential in widening the company’s ambit into the broader casual gaming and esports areas. “There is a huge opportunity to engage with a wider community of people just interested in playing games,” she said on the subsequent panel before referring once more to the dreaded “flywheel effect.”

Dead end kids: Innovation - or the slack of it - was the subject of a later panel on ‘finding gaming’s Netflix’ featuring Helen Walton, chief commercial officer and co-founder at the recently renamed G Games. “The problem is no matter how closely you tag each slot game - whatever you really get into - the fact is it is still a slot game,” she said. “And you have an audience which really likes slots. But what interests me is how do we broaden that audience, with a new type of game rather than just trying to acquire customers more cheaply.” She added it was “extremely hard to innovate and get distribution.” “I think we should be honest about the size of the problem and the very KPIs we use are part of the problem.”

Speed kills: On a payments panel, Fabrizio Bergamaschi, VP sales igaming, digital payments at Nuvei summed up one of the dilemmas for the payments firms when it comes to the job of enabling ever more frictionless transactions. Talking about how in omni-channel terms, transferring winnings can now be achieved seamlessly, he pointed out this might be contrary to what the gambling regulators would want. 

“In whatever location, you interact with any physical touchpoint and you are in and out with your winnings,” Bergamaschi said. “The faster you can do it, the better but the faster you do it, the more attention you get from the regulator. These sensitivities are growing.”

Newslines 

It’s a deal: Sportsbet’s parent company Flutter Entertainment has reached a settlement with the state of Kentucky over the activities of the online poker brand PokerStars during 2007-2011 and which Flutter acquired as part of its Stars Group takeover last year. It will pay  Kentucky $300m in total, in return Kentucky has agreed to cease all further actions with respect to the case. Kentucky had previously asked for a settlement of $870m.

Tying the knot: Ex-Fox bEt CEO Robin Chhabra has joined Red Knot Communications as chairman. Chhabra is currently President of Tekkorp Digital Acquisition Corp and has also led  corporate strategy, M&A and business development at The Stars Group and William Hill. He  will drive Red know’s US activities from the group’s recently-opened Austin, Texas, office.

Comment of the day: ”There is cachet in using crypto for the consumers,” Isabelle Delisle, global head of payment solutions, Pinnacle.

What we’re reading

“Back when cryptocurrency was incredibly scruffy and every Bitcoin exchange was basically in the business of facilitating drug trafficking for six months before pivoting to stealing all of its customers’ money, starting an exchange whose mission was like “we will return regulators’ phone calls, do know-your-customer checks and not steal customer money” was a real differentiator.” Matt Levine, Money Stuff, Bloomberg on crypto regulation.

Calendar

• 22 Sep: SBC Summit Barcelona day one, Sportsbet investor presentation

• 23 Sep: Playtech H1, XLMedia H1, SBC Summit Barcelona day two

Contact us

• Scott Longley scott@clearconcisemedia.com

• Jake Pollard jake@openmediaservices.com