UKbetting Chairman Peter Dubens revealed that content is now the essential side of the business and to better reflect the change, the company will soon introduce a new name.
The online sports content and gaming company announced its results for the first half of 2006, reporting an increase in group turnover of 12% to £62.4 million and an EBITDA profit of £1.6 million, up 76% over the first half 2005. The group operating profit was £0.1 million against a loss of £0.3m a year earlier.
Turnover in the Gaming Division was £54.9 million (H1 2005: £48.9 million) and in the Content Division turnover was £7.5 million (H1 2005: £6.6 million). As a result of growth in revenues, gross profit has increased 16% to £13.2 million, of which £6.8 million from the Gaming Division and £6.4 million from the Content Division.
Following the restructuring of the trade room designed to address sports betting profitability, the company approached sports betting more cautiously, with the result that sports betting margins increased from 3.2% to 5%. Overall gaming margin rose 19% to £7.1 million in the first half last year. Gaming registrations in the period were 53,000 up from 44,000 in same period last year, with over 60% of the totalbet and ukbetting registrations generated from group sites. A key developmentd during the period included the introduction of the single wallet for poker allowing sports book customers to play poker using the same funds from a single registration. UKbetting is now migrating its casino brands to the Playtech software platform, as announced in August 2006. The company also announced the purchase of an Italian bookmaker license to allow official promotion of Goldbet in the strategically important Italian market.
Users of the group\’s network of sites, including sportinglife.com, teamtalk.com, football365.com and rivals.net, continued to grow and reached a record 9.3m users a month across the period, viewing 433 million pages. The increase in pages viewed, which was up 54% from 282 million, meant that users were spending more time on the sites and this helped boost the advertising revenues to a record £1.74 million. This was achieved without the bulk of traditional bookmaker revenue and consumer brands accounted for 93% of sales compared with just 66% in the corresponding period last year.
Oddschecker with its affiliate revenues from bookmakers, poker rooms and casino operators saw traffic to its sites almost double to 375,000 monthly visitors, primarily as a result of promotion across the content sites. This helped boost revenue to £1.6 million, up 32% against the first half last year. Oddschecker\’s performance since it was acquired in 2003 has trebled. Other developments in the period included the launch of a mobile service and the re-build of casino.oddschecker.com and poker.oddschecker.com. A new faster version of the main site was launched in the first week of September ahead of a major marketing campaign in London.
“The first half of 2006 saw users across our online sports network exceed 9 million, viewing over 400m pages per month. This network has validated our focus on content by driving record growth across all advertising, affiliate, content syndication and gaming revenue streams. Especially encouraging was the growth in advertising and affiliate revenues which will now benefit for the first time ever from a dedicated marketing campaign. In addition to the improved margin in the fixed odds division, we are pleased that poker is now integrated into our single wallet and casino will follow before the year end. We will continue to follow a policy, as we have done from inception, of not taking bets from the US,” commented Chairman Peter Dubens.
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