A closer look: Unibet

Unibet has seen impressive growth outside its core Nordic markets and has targeted a top-five position in the UK’s sports betting market. But to hit those targets it will need to up its game on mobile

Unibet has been looking to spread its wings for some time, and earlier this year gave itself the ambitious target of a top five position in the UK sports betting market. The operator quickly realised that if it was to achieve those goals, its mobile product had to be up to scratch.

Unlike many of its UK-focused rivals who have seen huge investment in the channel due to an increasingly mobile-driven acquisition environment, twelve months ago Unibet could be said to be a little behind the chasing pack. Last year’s H1 results showed just 19% of its total gross winnings revenue from mobile devices and nowhere near the kind of mobile penetration boasted by the likes of William Hill and Paddy Power.

This comparatively slow adoption of mobile is partially explained by Unibet’s core Nordic markets where App Stores in the region have continued to forbid gambling apps from their listings. And comparisons with less UK-centric firms such as Betsson and bwin.party are far more forgiving.

But Unibet moved to address the mobile short fall and in September 2013 appointed Robert Smith as its head of new channels, making him responsible for the firm’s nascent mobile products and in particular growing the business to compensate for a slow start.

By the year’s end Unibet’s mobile business had indeed picked up, growing to 27% of total gross winnings revenue for the entire year on the back of renewed investment in the vertical. The firm’s full-year results had development and acquisition expenditure up 7.4% to £16m, with the firm citing improvements to its mobile customer experience as a key driver for the increase.

The growth in mobile has continued into 2014 and at the firm’s H1 results in March CEO Henrik Tjärnström stated the contribution of mobile to gross winnings revenue stood at 32% for the period, which compared well with 40% at William Hill and 52% at market leaders Paddy Power.

Unibet’s most recent results disclosure showed a strong sequential performance in the second quarter with sportsbook gross winnings in mobile up to 47% of total revenues. That figure was equivalent to around £30.45m, surpassing what Ladbrokes achieved on mobile in the same period. The firm might have been slower to embrace mobile, but it’s shown itself to be more than capable of playing catch-up.

Sporting Chance

Before it was spun off as a separate entity earlier this year, Unibet’s sportsbook technology was developed through its in-house team. This is now the B2B operator Kambi Sports Solutions, who continue to provide with its desktop and mobile sportsbook products.

Unibet Pro, the firm’s sole sports betting mobile application, has been built around the Kambi sportsbook with a large emphasis on getting customers to where they want to be and to what markets they want to bet on as soon as possible.

Popular markets are aggregated on the front page in a section of their own, while a feature at the bottom of the homepage collates four of the most popular sports bets and includes them as an accumulator bet, indicating how much a customer could win should they bet a specific amount.

In-play betting has proven to be a significant earner for sportsbooks and Unibet has placed its live betting markets at the very top of the app. Statistics of the in-play match – score, time, bookings and the number of corner kicks – are displayed at the top of the in-play page with the number of markets Unibet offers listed beneath.

The operator has built its app around in-play markets. Live streaming has become a principal element of its mobile offering – Unibet streamed more than 5,800 sporting events to mobile devices throughout H1 2014 – in an attempt to deliver value and engage with its audience.

And the firm has sponsored leading tournaments and events – most notably the Ultimate Fighting Championship and cricket’s Indian Premier League.

Tjärnström has conceded that if it is to grow as rapidly in the UK market as it would like the firm must target so-called “secondary sports” that aren’t perhaps given the coverage they deserve by some of the big players. And it has tailored its sportsbook adverts around such markets by recruiting notable sportsmen in these fields to star in the firm’s marketing campaigns. Cricketers Ian Botham and Graeme Swann both starred in campaigns in the build-up to England’s Ashes tour last winter.

It’s a strategy that has yet to fully pay off – the firm still makes a loss from its UK-facing business – but one that the firm is steadfastly persevering with. “We will continue with our longer strategy, but we need to be smarter and more relevant,” Tjärnström told sister publication eGaming Review in August, adding that “additional growth is expected”.

Spin while your winning

Unibet’s sports betting app includes a broad variety of casino slots and table games as well as bingo that can be played in app. But the firm has also spent considerable resource on developing a stand-alone casino app Spin City. The native casino app with smartphone and tablet-optimised versions, was developed with Relax Gaming and first released in April this year. The content comes from innovative games designer Quickspin who supplied a number of titles for the app, some of them exclusive.

Speaking previously to eGR Mobile Intelligence Daniel Eskola, head of gaming at Unibet, said that the decision to build Spin City as a native app instead of in HTML5 was in order to give customers a truly engaging and visually rich experience. “From a player’s point of view if you’re playing games on native it is basically desktop quality on the mobile device,” Eskola said, adding that modern devices are now more than equipped to handle the demands of native apps.

Perhaps more different to competitors apps in the casino space has been the addition of trophies and achievements, gamification features more commonly seen in social casino titles and similar to those currently popular with poker operators. Eskola believed Unibet had spotted a gap in the market in April when the game was released, noting that very few mobile apps had anything “exciting or visible” when it came to customer loyalty programmes, and that Spin City’s campaign would help set it apart from other casino-only apps in the market.

Producing a feature-rich, casino-dedicated app is still surprisingly rare. Paddy Power’s Roller Casino blazed a trail for this new generation of mobile casino products when it was first released in late 2012, but relatively few have followed suit. Unibet’s Spin City is the most ambitious mobile project from the firm to-date and it will be hoping for a significant boost in gaming revenues as a result.

The marketing campaign was designed to demonstrate how fast and easy to use the app is in comparison to others and early signs are it is gaining some traction. The firm noted the app contributed towards a 58% year-on-year increase in mobile casino revenues in the first six months of 2014.

This rise is also attributable to growth from Unibet’s female-orientated Maria brand, which has casino and bingo apps for both iOS and Android which Tjärnström said at the firm’s H1 results were built around the message of being “easy to play, and easy to win” with. The apps are kept simple and instead of flooding the home page with individual titles, games are separated into four individual categories – bingo, slots, table games and other games – in order to give customers that choice up front.

A busted flush?

But while the firm’s mobile sportsbook and casino products are growing poker, much like it is across the industry, has struggled to gain momentum since the operator made the decision to leave Microgaming’s MPN and go it alone last year. Revenues from the vertical fell 45% year-on-year in Q2 2014, however Tjärnström is confident the vertical will return to growth in 2015.

The firm recently confirmed it intends to launch a Maria-branded poker product using the same Relax Gaming-powered client that was released in April alongside Spin City. Unibet Poker has however yet to receive an iPhone dedicated version after the iPad version was released, despite the operator stating at the time a smartphone equivalent was set to follow.

Poker will undoubtedly be an area of focus for Unibet over the second half of the year, as it looks to return the vertical to growth in 2015. And while the vertical is yet to successfully translate to the mobile channel for most operators, the combination of its unique poker offering and an increased growth in tablet usage could see it buck the trend.

And this is something Unibet continues to do with both its desktop and mobile products. The firm is not afraid to go against the grain as the launch of its bespoke poker product and focus on secondary markets in sports betting proves. Spin City was another bold move and it has shown it is willing to be creative within sports betting with a range of live score apps and a real focus on in-play.

The firm’s strategy of identifying product niches and being prepared to experiment with features others have overlooked or deemed not worthy of the time, effort or expenditure could well bear fruit. At 32% of total gross winnings revenue Unibet is still behind the leading pack on mobile, but compared to more European-focused firms such as bwin.party with just 21% and the casino-focused Betsson with only 17% it is more than holding its own. And if it can find some cut-through in Europe’s most competitive markets with its innovative approach there could be a very strong 12 months in mobile to come.