Online Gambling in UK Shows Negative Results

UK online gambling industry has recorded a first-ever drop in revenues. UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has just released a financial report which shows generated gross gambling yield (GGY) of £14.4b over the previous 12 months including this past March. Compared to the same time last year, we can observe a slight decline of 0,3%. If we take a look at previous 12 months ending September 2019, we can see even greater revenue decline.

More About Report

Online gambling is still the most dominant sector throughout the UK. Its value stands at €5.3b which makes 37% of total gambling profit. Data for the past twelve months shows that the sports betting sector fell 11% coming to €1.83b value.

The horse racing industry has marked a 15 % fall over the 12 months, reaching the level of €522m. At the same time, football dropped for 4,4% hitting £991m level while virtual sports GGY income declined 12.5% to £68.6m.

Despite negative trends of most gambling types, Bingo GGY boosted 7.4% to £176.1m while pool betting climbed 17.4% to £33.7m. There is also a 1m increase in the total number of new online registrations. However, the number of active s reduced by 9.3% to 31m.

Land-based competitions come with a slight decrease in revenues. It fell less than 1% to £1.42b while making a better turnover of £8.91b.

Expectations

UKCG has released the last report before the implementation of a £2 maximum stake on fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBT) planned for high street betting shops. It comes into effect starting from August 1, 2020. At the moment, we can see a slight decline in betting shop machine GGY (about 1%) which resulted in £1.83b in total profit.

Meanwhile, betting shops’ B3 machines are already set to £2 stakes limit which seems to be a positive solution. GGY from these machines has reached a quadrupling amount of £670.8m thanks to “improvements in the way we collect and report granular data for those cabinets that offer games across multiple categories.”

UKGC’s report further shows betting shops decline of 3% to 8,320. It comes due to the closure of hundreds of shops starting from this past April. Taking into consideration other gambling results, we can observe National Lottery sales increase of 4% to £7.2b as well as land-based casino GGY drop of 10.3% to £1.6b. At the same time, Land-based bingo revenues declined less than 1% to £677m and arcades rose 1.8% to £429.6m.

Source:

“UK online gambling reports first negative revenue growth“, Steven Stradbrooke, calvinayre.com, November 28, 2019.