Need To Know: slim chance in France?
A busy week in French egaming saw parliament approve an egaming licence system and Ladbrokes and Mangas sign major media deals. Can the British operator pull it off? And what next for FDJ and PMU?
MON Dieu“¦ what a busy week zat waz.
The big news of course, was that the French parliament has cleared laws regulating online gambling, all but paving the way for a regulated egaming market open to foreign competitors.
Needless to say, this is great news for operators, who are ramping up their technology, product offering and brand positioning in France ahead of the laws expected to come into effect this summer.
Among those operators is Ladbrokes, which teamed up with premium TV giant Canal+ to form a JV company to target French betters, and Mangas Gaming, which signed with TV company Metropole 6 (M6), the second most-watched private television service in France, to offer betting on M6’s network of websites.
As you may remember, at EiG in September 888 and PartyGaming chief executives Gigi Levy and Jim Ryan extolled the virtues of their companies’ B2B arms as a hedge against the strength of former monopolies and major media companies entering the space.
As the deals above indicate, the media companies are doing just that; with not only Canal+ and M6 entering the space, but others including the Bouygues, owners of the Eurosport TV channel, which launched egaming arm SPS Betting in May.
Manning the ramparts
Such tooling up by operators and media companies was not unexpected by the biggest names in French betting, monopolies La Francaise Des Jeux (FDJ) and Pari-Mutuel Urbain (PMU), however, who have spent recent months upping their own game in preparation for the influx of new rivals.
For French national lottery operator FDJ, this includes a deal with Orange for the telecoms giant to incorporate betting into its French portals, as well as a sponsorship tie with TF1, France’s largest commercial TV channel and FDJ’s acquisition of LVS, the supplier that FDJ signed to provide its fixed-odds betting platform; as well as signing casino group Barrière to launch online poker after a licensing deal for poker with developer CyberArts.
That’s a lot of deals in 11 months.
For PMU, meanwhile, Europe’s largest horse racing monopoly, there has been a tie with PartyGaming for a poker product, B2B deals with Paddy Power to provide it with fixed-odds risk management and pricing tools and with Orbis to provide its OpenBet platform; plus January’s four-year sponsorship of the French football federation. If the former monopolies are to be forced to compete, they plan to enter the battle well-armed.
Ladbrokes, which enters the French market as a relative late-comer, given the brand strength that 888, Bwin, Sportingbet and Unibet already have there, will therefore compete not only with its usual rivals but two former monopolies boasting powerful brands and strong technology and marketing platforms, as well as a host of household name media companies.
With a partner the size of Canal+, however, it might just pull it off. The real question now is: what hope is there for any other new entrant?