France marks disappointing debut
The tipping point behind Ladbrokes’ decision to pull out of France before it had even launched operations may have been sparked by bolted-on VAT charges, but the market’s below-par performance since its launch four months ago has played an equally significant part in the UK operator’s withdrawal.
Indeed, while figures on the huge sums being spent on marketing and advertising by large companies in the first few months of France’s opening have made for interesting reading, until recently precious little impartial data on how this was translating into the size of the legal market had been forthcoming.
The incongruity between the comments of Bwin’s Norbert Teufelberger in August that he expected his company to make a profit there by 2011, and those of other new entrants (see Isabelle Parize of Mangas Gaming’s comments in the Q&A in the forthcoming issue of eGR), also gave little clarity. This however changed two weeks ago, when French regulator ARJEL published its first set of figures on the legal market’s performance in the first four months since it opened in June.
Released to French newspaper La Tribune, prominence was given to figures clearly aimed at demonstrating the dynamism and scale of an opening that has generated many miles of column inches and much debate in the country. Two million accounts had been opened, revealed ARJEL, with an average of 500,000 active players a week betting an average of 100 every seven days.
Other figures, however, provided a more revealing picture of how the newly regulated market is developing. It is just one quarter the size ARJEL had estimated the offshore market to have reached prior to regulation and, considering this includes PMU and FDJ, this is less than impressive.
However, the organisation’s president, Jean-Francois Vilotte, appearing on a panel at the Sportel event in Monaco two days later, refuted an audience member’s suggestion that conditions were causing players to gamble more yet were not providing sufficient value for money to attract customers to legal sites, and correspondingly affecting the French government’s tax take.
“The aim was to go from illegal to legal demand without an explosion of demand. We did not want more online gaming or for this to explode. We are in line with what we anticipated before we implemented the system. For the French government, this was never tax related. There has been much parliamentary debate about this “ we hardly have an explosion,” he said.
Indeed, while Mangas Gaming CEO Nicolas Beraud was understandably pleased with ARJEL’s figures with his company’s BetClic brand capturing around 40% of legal sports bets placed since France’s opening, he said on a panel the next day that this was a share of a “tiny” market.
ARJEL itself admitted a few days earlier that the sports betting market had performed below expectations, particularly on football, accounting for 56% of stakes during the four-month period, compared to ARJEL’s projection of 70-80%.
Beraud placed the blame firmly at the door of the French authorities’ high tax and betting duties, low payback ratio and arduous player registration process, telling the audience: “There are 13 licences for sports betting, we understand there are some more pending, so there will probably be 16 or 17 over the next few months. According to ARJEL, the market will be 160-200m a year, with the tax rate, you keep 80m and if you divide by 15 operators you have 5.6m a year, so it is a tiny market. There is not a lot of room for many companies.”
Conditions needed to change urgently if the country’s sports betting market was to provide attractive enough incentives to draw players to legal sites and for the French government to meet its player protection goals, said Beraud. “Over the next two to three years, we will have a maximum of three to four companies offering sports betting if we stay under the same conditions. We always spend too much [on tax] but it is crazy. We are paying three to four times the tax of the UK or Italy. For sports betting it is not possible to be profitable.”
But with the horseracing market performing in line with forecasts reaching 215m in four months and allowing PMU to capture the bulk of this, its representative on the panel was perhaps understandably less prepared than his counterparts to call for the French government to change underlying conditions when they come up for official review late next year.
“If illegal operators are controlled and are sanctioned, then we can live with the level of taxation. It is important punters cannot be playing on other foreign operators’ sites”, PMU’s head of international development, Aymeric Verlet, told the audience.