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Italy 2018: Bet365 and Stars head €1.5bn market

| By Stephen Carter
PokerStars finished 2018 as top dog in Italy’s largest online segment of casino, claiming 9.6% or €6.82m of the €710m GGR generated by licensed operators, according to estimates exclusively provided to iGB by Ficom Leisure. 

PokerStars finished 2018 as top dog in Italy’s largest online segment of casino, claiming 9.6% or €6.82m of the €710m GGR generated by licensed operators, according to estimates exclusively provided to iGB by Ficom Leisure.

Italy’s online casino and slots market grew by 25% year-on-year in 2018, on the back of a 29% year-on-year increase in 2017.

Double-digit growth from online sports bettng, up 14% from 2017 to €640.9m, saw the market top the €1.5bn mark for the first time, having smashed the landmark €1bn barrier just two years ago (see first chart below).

Ficom Leisure's Christian Tirabassi said: “The Italian online gaming and betting market continues its upward trend in 2018 with €219m growth over 2017 amounting to €1.53bn, which represents a 17% year-on-year growth.

“Casino & slots and sports betting are still the main GGR drivers on the online market with market shares of 46% and 42%, respectively.”

Bet365 finished the year atop the country’s remote betting market with 16.4% market share, fighting off the challenge of Planetwin365 which emerged in the first half of 2018. The multi-channel operator ended the year in second place with 14.7%.

The Stoke-headquarted giant also finished the year with 7.1% share of the country’s total regulated betting market, despite not operating a retail business there.

“The sports betting market upward trend has also persisted, leading to a GGR of €1.48b, 57% of which from landbased and 43% from online/mobile,” Tirabassi added.

PokerStars predictably headed the country’s dot.it poker market with 63.3% of the tournament revenue and 40.1% of ring games, although both segments saw a year-on-year contraction, tournaments down marginally 82m from €83.2m with the more fragmented cash games market down 7% to €65.2m.

Scroll down for the full 2016-18 interactive dashboards, followed by operator market shares for 2018 across casino, sports betting and poker.

All data and figures are processed by leading European corporate advisory firm Ficom Leisure, a specialist in all segments of the betting and gaming sector.

Ficom Leisure also provides monthly figures on the New Jersey online market in the New Jersey iGaming Dashboard. It also provides quarterly figures on the Spanish online market in the Spain iGaming Dashboard and on the Danish online market in the Denmark iGaming Dashboard.

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