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Part 1 : The data trail British retail betting report
THE DATA TRAIL
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TRADING UNTIL LOCKDOWN
The timing of the UK Gambling Commission ’ s end of year reporting falling in March means an almost complete picture is available of the state of UK retail just before the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns struck .
The data contains a full year of shop trading since the introduction of the maximum £ 2 stake on B2 machines came into force on 1 April 2019 . As such , it was always going to mark a watershed for the retail sector and so it proved .
As can be seen from the data on machine revenues , there was an immediate impact . Machine gross gaming yield ( GGY ) across both B2s and B3s dropped by £ 751m , or 41 % year-on-year , to £ 1.075bn .
The scale of the fall takes the sector back 12 years to 2009 , when machine revenues were last at these levels : 2009 gaming machine GGY was £ 1.071bn .
To get an idea of the shift that has taken place in machine play in the past two years there is more granular data available from the Commission on the breakdown between B2 and B3 .
However , the nature of the reporting to the Commission from the bookmakers over the years has masked the levels of B3 play by logging all interactions on a B2-capable machine ( i . e . every machine that was both B2 and B3 enabled ). It means B3 play was underreported while B2 play is now likely suffering the same fate . The substitution effect between B2 and B3 is , therefore , hard to discern in this data set .
But what is clear is the extent to which the bookmakers sweated their combined machine estates for all