Market Monitor: France Q4 and FY 2017
Key Takeaways
  • Online poker grew in 2017, returning to levels exceeding that of 2014 and ending a six-year slide.
  • Stability in cash games and continued growth in tournaments both helped reverse the perennial trend.
  • Sports betting, excluding horse racing, now accounts for half the total igaming market in France.

Market Monitor is a new series of articles highlighting the key data and trends in individual markets, published on a regular monthly or quarterly basis.

Online poker returned to growth in France in 2017, up 5.8% to €243.6 million. It ends six straight years of declining revenue. In fact, last year was strong enough to return to levels not observed since 2014. It sets the market on a strong course as operators reconsider their position to the market in the advent of European shared liquidity in online poker which came into force in Q1 2018.

This growth came through gains primarily in tournaments, which have enjoyed 11 straight quarters of year-over-year growth. However, revenue from cash games has also stabilized, with single-digit year-over-year growth in both Q3 and Q4 2017, enough to end the year approximately flat.

In other igaming verticals, the exceptionally strong Q4 in 2017—a phenomenon observed throughout the industry in multiple markets—skews the results, but even accounting for this anomaly, sports betting continues to grow every quarter, and it now accounts for half of all gross gaming revenue in the regulated market. Horse racing, separated in the charts below, and online poker are approximately equal in share.