Poland’s state-run gambling operator Totalizator Sportowy is celebrating its first full year of online casino and lottery activity, during which customers opened over 320k accounts.
On Thursday, Totalizator Sportowy updated the nation on its performance during the first year of online operations. On December 5, 2018, the company launched its new Total Casino site courtesy of UK-listed technology provider Playtech, which won a tender in March 2018 for the right to power Poland’s online casino monopoly.
Totalizator Sportowy president Olgierd Cieślik said Friday that TotalCasino.pl and its sister site Lotto.pl had together registered over 320k accounts in their first year of operation. Total Casino players had made over 1.3b slots spins and lottery fans had made over 45m bets on the Lotto site. Both sites do the majority of their business via mobile devices.
Totalizator Sportowy reported total sales of PLN6.1b (US$1.58b) in 2018, up 8.5% from 2017’s result. The company said Friday that it expects its online operations to contribute PLN3.8b to its 2019 sales, roughly equal to 40% of the expected total, maintaining projections it made at 2019’s half-year mark.
It may enjoy the benefits of a monopoly, but Totalizator Sportowy doesn’t plan to rest on its laurels. Cieślik says “advanced works” are underway for Total Casino to add a live casino option in 2020, presumably using Playtech’s in-house live dealer product.
Despite its monopoly, Totalizator Sportowy and the country’s 14 private online sports betting licensees currently control only slightly more than half of Poland’s online gambling market. The country’s online gambling blacklist featured 8,246 prohibited domains as of December 5, up from 7,098 as of mid-August.
Totalizator Sportowy is also expanding its land-based slots operations, over which it also holds a monopoly (outside casinos). By the end of 2019, the company expects to have 200 slot parlors in operation.
A location in Katowice recently added a new type of slot – “the roulette model” – which suggests that all those roulette-based fixed-odds betting terminals that found themselves with nowhere to stay after the closure of hundreds of UK betting shops have finally found a new home.
