Italian online gambling market continues to prosper

The Italian gambling market continued to expand in July despite the nation’s economic difficulties, with official statistics showing that Italian punters continued to bet on all forms of gambling, although online poker cash game revenues dipped by 5.3 percent in the year so far compared with the corresponding period in 2016.

That could change following a recent agreement on player-sharing pools by Italy, France, Portugal and Spain (see previous reports).

The Bloomberg business news agency reported that at $113 billion in 2016, the market has expanded three-fold over the past decade, due mainly to the introduction of online gambling, a wider range of betting options and games, and better safety regulations.

Lottery games remain the most played vertical, followed by slots and table games, but sports betting is also proving popular.

The figures for July 2017 show that licensed bookmakers in Italy enjoyed total sports betting revenue up 4 percent on the preceding month at Euro 86.5 million. Interestingly the SKS365 company overtook rival bet365 to claim the top spot with a mix of retail and online revenues of Euro 11.7 million.

Bet365 languished at sixth on the overall list (but was the top online sports betting performer) with Italian revenue of Euro 7.9 million, well behind overall market leaders SKS365, SNAI (Euro 11.5 million) and Eurobet (Euro 9.8 million).

The total online sports betting revenue count in July was Euro 38.3 million, a rise of just over 11 percent on June 2017.

In purely online terms SKS365 digital subsidiary Planetwin365 chased bet365 with revenues in July of Euro 6.5 million, followed by SNAI and Eurobet, each on Euro 3.3 million.

In the online casino vertical, revenues rose 5 percent month-over-month to Euro 44.9 million, bringing the year-to-date figure to Euro 313 million (up 29 percent y-o-y).

Lottomatica led the sector with a market shatre of 9.73 percent, chased by PokerStars on 9.03 percent; Sisal on 8.22 percent; Eurobet on 6 percent and William Hill on 5.7 percent.

PokerStars was, as expected, the leader in the online poker vertical with a 71 percent lion’s share of the tournament market, where stakes reached Euro 5.9 million – up 23 percent year-on-year. In year-to-date terms online poker tournament stakes in Italy are up 17.4 percent at Euro 49 million.

On the cash game front PokerStars again led the market, but with a lower margin of 45.5 percent, with total cash game revenues from the vertical reaching of Euro 5.1 million.

On a year-to-date basis online poker cash game revenue in Italy is down 5.3 percent year-on-year at Euro 41 million.