Betfair "will be market leader", says new interim CEO
Stephen Morana tells eGR that Betfair has "turned a corner" and will become the "market leader" in the areas it has chosen to invest including fixed odds sportsbook and mobile.
Betfair has “turned a corner” and will become the “market leader” in the areas it has chosen to invest including fixed odds sportsbook and mobile, the operator’s interim CEO Stephen Morana has told eGaming Review.
Morana, the current CFO who was today unveiled as the company’s interim chief executive between David Yu leaving on 31 December and Breon Corcoran joining in August next year, said that as its fixed odds sportsbook is integrated and its mobile sports betting products continue to grow he is confident Betfair will close the gap on its competitors and take the lead as the industry’s leading operator.
“If we can continue to deliver over the next 12 to 18 months I’m really, really confident we will be able to say to every customer who bets on sports, ‘why the hell are you betting anywhere else when we’ve got everything that the competition has got and more’?
Following on from this morning’s strong half year announcement that saw Betfair produce a year-on-year core revenue increase of 12%, the exchange growing 20% in the second quarter and its latest iPhone app update receiving glowing reviews, Morana added that there was a new found momentum both internally and externally of the business.
“This set of numbers out today is really strong, the prior set of numbers was really strong. There’s a real positive momentum in the business and a real energy now,” he said.
“I look at the new iPhone app that we have out today, only six weeks after the prior iPhone app we released, and it gives me real excitement that the areas in which we’ve chosen to invest is going to make us the market leader by far in those areas.”
Betfair now has more than 50 specialist mobile staff both in the UK and in San Fransico with the latest figures revealing that 41% of its UK exchange customers placed a mobile bet in November. In the first half of its financial year, mobile grew strongly, with the number of mobile bets doubling to 16.2m and mobile revenue increasing by 88% to £9.1m.
After close to three years and £100m investment in a complete overhaul of its systems and IT infrastructure, Betfair is gearing itself up to reveal a new website and bolted on fixed odds sportsbook in 2012 with its Irish customers already able to access a beta version. The current load time of its home page is 20 seconds, however the new site promises to cut this to just 3 seconds.
Morana told eGR that OpenBet would be “heavily involved” in providing the platform for the new sportsbook adding that it would launch before the European football championships in June next year but that this deployment would continue “over time”.
“What we’re not saying is we’re just launching a sportsbook on a different tab. We can do that very quickly. For us it’s about having an integrated sports solution which mingles risk-taking with the core exchange and where you’ll have risk taking where the exchange doesn’t really work.”
Asked what his priorities are and what he can expect to achieve before Corcoran joins in eight months time Morana said it was “very clear”.
“We need to deliver as we have been delivering. The financials are the first thing. We have two more sets of results we need to deliver before August; we have the Euro 2012’s coming up and we need to deliver strong marketing around that and need that to work; and we have some of the product improvements that need to be delivered and we need to keep on building and growing the quality team of people in the business,” he added.