Playtech Present their 2018 Results

Playtech presented their 2018 year end results today.

The presentation made for interesting reading but didn’t give a lot of insight into the success or otherwise of their live casino B2B operation.  It’s still a relatively small part of their overall operation. Small enough not to warrant being segmented in their results presentation anyway.

Playtech’s 2018 year yielded total revenues of €1.24 billion, and a net profit of €256 million.

To put these numbers in perspective, their net profit was larger that Evolution Gaming’s total revenue for 2018. But these are two very different companies. One a live gaming provider pure-play, the other  a diverse online gambling business whose B2B revenues accounted for less than half of total revenue in 2018.

Playtech’s B2B revenues were segmented broadly as follows.

Buried somewhere in that €320 million figure is their revenue from the supply of live casino games.

Hard to miss the fact that overall casino B2B revenue has dropped substantially from 2017. Whether, and to what extent this fall is mirrored within live casino remains unclear.

The only specific mention of live, is a slide proclaiming a:

27% Growth in Live Casino NGR *

The asterisk – excludes Asia.

The slide in Asian market B2B revenues is one of the key takeaways from the presentation, highlighted in the below slide. A fall of over €110 million, or 38% year on year is massive. Whether the fall was as dramatic for the live casino segment in Asian markets, isn’t disclosed.

Almost as telling is a 27% increase in regulated market revenue. Indeed, the first bullet point on the Chairman’s highlights slide was the fact that 80% of group revenue is now out of regulated markets. A big part of this was B2C revenues from acquisitions in regulated markets (Snaitech in particular), but clearly their B2B business is moving this way also.

Without any specific numeric guidance, but reading between the lines from the above, one could deduce that Playtech’s live casino story for 2018 is something like: strengthening in EU and regulated markets, struggling in Asian and grey markets.

Another slide that caught my eye was this one.

Of particular interest is the the fact that the US made it onto this slide.

Application for a New Jersey license, and ‘process underway‘ in other states, suggest Playtech do after all want to play a part in the US online gambling story. This is despite moving a lot slower than the likes of Evolution, Authentic and Ezugi, whose American live dealer operations are already up and running (and in some cases rapidly expanding).