UK-listed online bingo and casino operator Stride Gaming narrowed its losses in its most recent fiscal year, although the reduction was partially due to one-off asset sales.
On Wednesday, Stride issued its latest annual report covering the 12 months ending August 31, during which revenue improved 8.7% to £89m. Stride operates over 170 different gaming brands and is the UK’s third-largest online bingo operator, holding roughly one-quarter of the local market.
The revenue gains were in large part to Stride’s proprietary technology platform Real Money Gaming, which saw its revenue rise nearly one-quarter to £60.5m after reducing its exposure to VIP gamblers and “bonus hunters.”
Stride’s annual earnings fell 18.2% to £16.1m, which the company blamed on the UK’s new tax on free bets, but the company’s pre-tax loss narrowed to £5m from £25.7m the year before.
Stride’s bottom line got a £10.4m boost during the period from the sale of its stake in Spanish online operator QSB Gaming to Rank Group, although Stride also took a £4.4m hit from the discontinuation of its InfiniApps social gaming unit.
Stride CEO Eitan Boyd hailed his company’s “very satisfactory” revenue growth despite the “very challenging trading environment” in the UK. Boyd added that trading to date in the current fiscal year has been “satisfactory and in line with our expectations.”
Boyd didn’t directly reference the £7.1m penalty imposed on a Stride subsidiary last week by the UK Gambling Commission, saying only that the company had “absorbed further fiscal and regulatory costs to reflect the changed trading environment” and that the company would “continue to adjust and right-size our cost-base to mitigate these pressures.”
Stride took a more strident stance in the immediate wake of the UKGC penalty, calling the fine “excessive and disproportionate” given that its identified failings were “procedural in nature and did not involve any incidence of identifiable money laundering.”
Prior to that penalty, Stride’s financial reserves had risen by £3m to £29.2m at the end of August, and on Wednesday Stride announced that shareholders would receive a special dividend of 8p per share on top of the final dividend of 1.7p.
