Germany’s JAXX SE saw gross revenues rise 24% in Q2 2011 to €39.1m. Net gaming revenue was up 3.3% to €12.2m, while EBITDA slipped 22.4% to €713k. Sportsbetting was off 17.3% from 2010 (underscoring a common complaint by bookmakers that there can’t be a World Cup every summer), casino and poker operations were up 52.2% and lotteries fell 3.4%. Surveying the overall landscape, JAXX CEO Mathias Dahms claimed to be “very satisfied … even though the high number of wins by [European football] favorites cost us a lot of money.” In the near future, Dahms is confident that sportsbetting subsidiary myBet.com will receive an Italian gaming license in a few weeks and be operational before year’s end. Dahms also expects JAXX will receive a gaming license from Schleswig-Holstein (a/k/a the reasonable German state) by the start of 2012.
Software provider Cryptologic saw its total revenues rise to $6.978m in Q2, compared with $6.739m last year. Hosted casino revenue was $5.7m, branded games accounted for $2.1m, while ‘poker and other’ produced a mere $200k. The company continues to reduce its operating expenses, which helped after-tax income come in at $243k, a dramatic turnaround from the millions in losses the company has endured over the past year or more. That downturn led to CEO Brian Hadfield’s resignation last August, and prompted the company to hire Deloitte Corporate Finance this spring to perform a ‘strategic review’, which is still ongoing.
Las Vegas-based gaming equipment supplier Bally Technologies took in $214m in its fiscal Q4, compared with $195.3m the previous year. The improvement comes despite a still sluggish US gaming market, with fewer casino openings and existing venues hell bent on squeezing every second of usable product life from their current stable of slots. Bally sold 13,537 new machines in fiscal 2011, down sharply from 2010’s 17,334. However, the average selling price of those 2011 machines was $15,832, a 10% boost on 2010’s average of $14,398, so ‘yay’ inflation. Looking forward, Bally CEO Richard Haddrill expects overseas expansion in Australia and Italy to “provide good revenue and earnings growth in current and future years.”
