Will fantasy sports be Tabcorp’s saviour?

Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Goodridge said this week that the Australian gambling group Tabcorp may turn to an expanded fantasy sports offering to counter falling market share in the highly competitive online gambling sector.

Under pressure from aggressive foreign-owned online gambling brands, the company’s market share of online wagering turnover is in decline from 30 percent in 2010 to a likely 23 percent by next year, Goodridge told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

Goodridge offers some hope for Tabcorp, pointing to its popular fantasy sports product and suggesting that it should focus more on this vertical.

The company recently signed a partnership agreement with the UK-based newspaper The Sun, which enables Tabcorp to access opportunities through The Sun’s Dream Team fantasy football contests that currently attract a million readers.

“If Tabcorp was to launch its own daily fantasy sports site this could be used as another subscriber acquisition tool which would allow Tabcorp to start to monetise this new subscriber with racing products,” says Goodridge suggested. “This is exactly what Tabcorp currently does with its sports products.

“News Corp in Australia runs the largest NRL fantasy league and also the soccer fantasy leagues, hence we do not think it unreasonable that Tabcorp could partner with News Corp in Australia for daily fantasy sports.”

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