Sportingbet Revenue Down 35% To £38.8m In Q1

Sportingbet has now announced its Q1 financial results covering the period between August 1st and October 31st, revealing a 35% fall in revenue to £38.8 million from £59.9 million in the same period last year.
However, the drop in revenue has mostly been put down to relatively few sporting events taking place during the first quarter and Sportingbet’s board said that they are still confident of reaching its full year expectations. As the company’s CEO Andrew McIver, commented: “It is not unusual, August and September can be quite difficult months for us, because there are few sporting events, and margin can suffer.”
Overall, the first quarter saw strong growth in Sportingbet’s Australian active customers, with wagers up by 3.5%. Nevertheless, pre-tax gross win margin fell from the 7.2% it attained last year to 6.6% in Q1 2012.
In Europe, the amounts wagered improved by a mere 2%, due mostly to challenging economic conditions, as well as stringent gambling regulations. Games revenue declined by 33.1%, while Poker revenue plummeted by a massive 49.5% which, as explained by the company, reflected “continued structural decline in online poker.”
As regards its Spanish business, wagers were down a whopping 57%, with casino and poker weak on account of regulatory product restraints and increased  competition from such companies as bwin and bet365. Commenting on the situation, CEO Andrew McIver said: “Year-on-year, we do believe we have lost market share, and the reason for that is we obviously had a period where the website was closed during last year, following the legal injunction from one of our competitors. However, we have been slowly clawing it back since the regulation came in, and we re-opened the site.”
Looking ahead, Sportingbet said November has been a particularly strong month for the company, especially in Australia. Following the Q1 announcements, Sportingbet shares are currently trading lower by 2.17% at 45p. This price is still near the top of its 52 week high of 45.75p, and far above the 27p it was trading at in May.