Part 1: The UK market – a split screen
Part 1
The UK market – a split screen
A bifurcated market educated guesses as to what lies behind the tale
It is in the nature of market appraisals to look for of winners and losers.
patterns and to make judgments based on what
As much as there are nuances within the
we think we see and what we think that might numbers we can see, it would appear to be
portend. So, with the online gambling market in the case that the UK market is very much split
the UK, the Market Monitor series for iGaming between the top two multiproduct operators
Business has attempted over the past few years (bet365 and Sky Betting & Gaming) and the rest
to better understand the ebbs and flows within who – with some notable exceptions depending
the market to assess where we think it is heading on the vertical – are failing to keep pace with the
and what that might mean for the participants. market leaders. For ease of comparison, we have
The task has been made easier by the
split the following into two groups – leaders and
comparative accessibility of data about the followers – though we must add that this list is by
market, not least from the UK Gambling no means exhaustive.
Commission, which from the start of the new
There are many medium and small competitors,
point of consumption (PoC) regulatory regime particularly in gaming, doing much more in the
in late 2014 has been better able to measure the UK than simply making up the numbers – Stride
gross gaming revenues (GGR) across the market and Gaming Realms are just two (listed) names
and do so with a hitherto unknown degree of that would come into the reckoning. As Simon
granularity on individual products and verticals. French, analyst at Cenkos, points out, gaming
Data-wise, we can see that in the intervening
companies occupying niche positions in the
near three-year period an already sizeable market market appear to be performing more strongly,
has grown further, to £4.46bn in the year to benefiting from better targeted customer
September 2016, according to the latest statistics, acquisition and flexible retention techniques.
published in May 2017. “Furthermore, new entrants appear to be taking
This is obviously a trailing figure – now over
a year old – and it means that market sizing
disproportionate share,” he adds.
But the names included in the list of market
remains, as we said at the time of the last Market followers below are chosen deliberately because
Monitor, an art as much as a science. Still, when of their involvement (either actual or potential)
we are looking for direction of travel rather than in the consolidation that continues to affect the
aggregate market size, we do have more recent sector and which we discuss later in this report.
data to look at.
Much of it comes from some of the more
Looking at the market in this way answers the
question about whether the UK market is still
prominent names in the UK market, both in terms growing. That remains a qualified yes. As Rory
of listed operators and from the private sphere. Anderson, consultant to 12Bet, says, the market is
From this we can not only get a clearer idea of “dominated by the big guns” of bet365 and Sky
who is making the running in the UK and who Betting & Gaming, who each have the resources
is falling behind, but we can also make some to wield enormous marketing budgets. “But there
iGaming Business Market Monitor • December 2017
3