Poll results: bwin.party profits to decline in spite of new strategy
Nearly 40% of respondents to eGR poll anticipate operator will be hit by loss of unregulated revenues and taxes from regulated markets.
Bwin.party’s “slimmed-down” strategy will fail to prevent a decline in profits, eGaming Review readers have said in this week’s poll.
Some 38% of respondents believe a combination of taxes from regulated markets and the loss of unregulated revenues will hit the operator’s bottom line, following last week’s announcement from CEO Norbert Teufelberger after last week’s FY 2012 results that it would be “shifting [its] revenue mix towards nationally regulated and to be-regulated markets”.
As of December last year, half of bwin.party’s revenues were locally regulated and/or taxed, with 38% of revenues falling into the latter category alone.
More than 31% of readers were convinced that this new outlook would help bwin.party emerge as the cross-product leading operator in regulated markets, with a promising regulatory outlook in the United States – with Teufelberger suggesting New Jersey could be a two-horse race between bwin.party and Caesars – perhaps factored into such considerations.
One quarter of readers anticipate the operator being one of the first entrants into newly regulating markets, following its successful pursuit of first-mover advantage in Spain and Denmark over the last 18 months.
Last year saw bwin.party’s former co-CEO Jim Ryan suggest the operator would become the “clear number two” in the online poker market following the migration of bwin’s players to the PartyPoker platform, a process completed in December.
However, despite the PartyPoker brand overtaking Full Tilt to rise to second place in Pokerscout’s worldwide cash poker liquidity rankings this week, just 6% of readers polled were convinced of the operator’s top-two aspirations.