Italy’s licensed online sports betting operators continue to lag their land-based counterparts in generating revenue, despite cleaning their clock in betting turnover.
Official figures published by Italian gaming news outlet Agimeg show overall land-based and online sports betting turnover hitting €878.8m in February, a 6.7% gain over the same month last year.
Italian-licensed online sites saw turnover rise 17% year-on-year to €505m, while land-based operators saw their share decline 4.7% to €373.3m. However, land-based punters are apparently much worse at prognostication, as land-based betting revenue totaled €73.1m while online betting revenue managed only €50.9m.
The SKS365 Group’s Planetwin365 brand hoovered up 16.1% of February’s online betting turnover compared to Bet365’s 15%, the only two operators to achieve double-digit slices of the overall online pie. However, Bet365 claimed a nearly 29% share of February’s online betting revenue, three times the 9.4% share enjoyed by Planetwin365.
The rest of the top-five online betting revenue earners were led by Ladbrokes Coral Group’s Eurobet brand (8.5%), followed by local operator Snaitech, whose 7.31% narrowly edged out local rival Sisal’s 7.24%.
Snai was also the retail betting market leader with a 16.2% share of land-based turnover, followed by Eurobet (14.4%), Lottomatica (12.6%), Sisal (11.81%) and Goldbet (11.79%).
Turning to the online casino numbers, revenue shot up 33.5% year-on-year to €54.9m, although this was below January’s market record of €59.7m. The Stars Goup’s PokerStars brand scored top honors with a 9% share of online casino revenue, relegating traditional number one operator Lottomatica to second place with 8.7%. Sisal wasn’t far behind with 8.65%, while Eurobet (6.4%) and 888 Holdings (6%) rounded out the top-five.
On the poker front, both tournament (€7.6m) and cash games (€5.9m) revenue were effectively unchanged from February 2017. PokerStars maintained dominance of both poker verticals, although its tournament share fell to 62.3% while its cash games’ figure slipped to 39.6%, the first time in a dog’s age that the company hasn’t claimed at least 40% of the cash games market.
888 launched its Italian-facing poker site in January, and the company saw its tournament share rise to 1.71%, good enough for sixth place, while its cash games offering ranked seventh with a 3.6% share.
Next Monday (19) marks the cutoff for Italian online gambling hopefuls to submit bids for the latest round of licenses. As of late last month, Italian regulators had reportedly received only around 10 applications for the maximum 120 available licenses, although the government expected many of the current licensees to file their renewal paperwork late in the game.
