For a significant cohort of punters, action in the real-world atmosphere of a traditional high street bookies will forever be the juice.
And so it’s proved for FTSE100 Omni-channel Entain, which has just posted a trading update for its financial half-year, ending June 30, 2022.
Online, so recently super-charged by the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, was down. But overall revenue–boosted by the return of retail—was up by some 18 per cent.
Retail revenue, led by the nearly 4,000 UK high street betting shops in their Ladbrokes Coral vertical, was up almost 250 per cent, year-on-year, said the Isle of Man-headquartered gaming giant.
But Internet action was down across all metrics in H1. Online gaming revenue, overall, fell nine per cent in H1, online sports betting revenue dropped six per cent and wagers were down three per cent, year-on-year.
As a result, Entain has downgraded its full year forecast.
The group now expects digital NGR to be flat for 2022, against prior predictions of seven per cent online growth.
Overall, EBITDA is now poised to be in the region of £960 million (US$1.13bn/€1.13bn), against a previous estimate of £1.02 billion (US$1.2bn/€1.2bn).
2023 EBITDA—m&a, and regulatory developments, depending—is forecast to be around £1.1 billion (US$1.3bn/€1.29bn).
Meantime, good news continues to flow from the US where Entain’s BetMGM sports book joint venture with MGM Resorts has a 24 per cent market share and is on track to post more than US$1.3 billion in revenue for the full year (£1.09bn/€1.29bn).
“[Although] the macro-economic outlook is uncertain, the underlying performance of our business remains strong,” said Entain CEO Jetté Nygaard-Andersen in summation.
“With an increasingly recreational customer base, and relatively resilient revenue, we remain confident that our customer focus, diversification and proven ability to grow both organically and through m&a will enable us to deliver further progress against our strategy.
“I am very pleased to see that more customers are choosing to play with us, reflecting our focus on recreational players and putting the customer at the heart of everything we do.”