- Focus will be on regulated markets, less on marketing the dot-com product.
- Poker revenues declined significantly in 2012.
- 2012 bore the costs of platform integration.
- Belgium site to go live in a couple of weeks.
Bwin.Party CEO Norbert Teufelberger set out the company’s strategy in presenting results for 2012: less marketing spend on .COM, more focus on regulated markets, and a drive for “more on value and less on volume.”
Taking attention away from quantity makes sense given the continued weakness of poker in bwin.party’s portfolio. “Unique Active Players” have fallen from a post UIGEA peak of 936k in Q1 of 2010 to 597k in the last quarter of 2012. Daily revenues from poker are down €260k over the same period.
After tax the group ended up with a loss of €64.7m. Co-CEO Jim Ryan left in January, leaving Norbert Teufelberger alone to explain the weak performance and what he plans to do about it.
His upbeat explanation: “Most of last year was focused on integration. 2013 will be about completing this effort and transforming our business through innovation.”
The group has migrated its various clients onto a single platform which is used across all domains and in all markets whether regulated or not. There is no doubt that this was an expensive process, and during the year the company also picked up several new national regulatory licenses which incurred substantial costs as well as increasing tax liabilities.
In answering questions, the CEO indicated that he expected the new Belgian licensed site to go live within a couple of weeks.
