Growth in online games boosts ukbetting

UKbetting, The online gaming and sports websites operator, said yesterday its losses have narrowed as the popularity of internet poker and casino games playing grows.

UKbetting, The online gaming and sports websites operator, said yesterday its losses have narrowed as the popularity of internet poker and casino games playing grows.

Peter Dubens, who isstepping up to become the executive chairman, said the company was on the prowl for further acquisitions as ukbetting heads towards profitability. "What you need in this business is scale and we will be looking for opportunities," he said as he announced a 56 per cent increase in turnover to £43m. Within this, an average of 194 new players per day have registered on its betting sites, which include totalbet.com and ukbetting.com, taking its total number of customers to 225,500.

While its sports betting division did well from favourable horse racing results and the unexpected winners of the Euro 2004 football championship, online casino games has driven the growth. Its gross win margin has strengthened to 9.9 per cent from 3.9 per cent, which helped narrow losses to £300,000 in the six months to the end of June from a £1.6m loss in the same period in 2003. It is expected to become profitable next year.

The company has spent the past three years spending $25m on buying up sports content websites such as 365Football.com and planetrugby.com, through which it drives traffic to its betting sites. Mr Dubens said: "We have been making moves in to broadcasting sports events on the internet. We are not too far away from seeing live sports events broadcast on our betting sites." Visitors to its content pages have increased by 71 per cent to 6 million and revenues doubled to £7m. An increasing number of advertisers are coming to its sites, and advertising revenues more than doubled to £1.6m.

Mr Dubens, who is at present deputy chairman, takes over from David Sieff, who has been chairman of ukbetting since it floated in 2001 and will retire in October. Shares in the company, which have fallen 6.5 per cent this year, yesterday closed unchanged at 50p.