Q&A: Henrik Tjärnström, CEO, Unibet

eGaming Review (eGR): What were the highlights for you in the Q2 results?

Henrik Tjärnström (HT): The World Cup was clearly a significant opportunity for us. We had a detailed plan in place in the year leading up to the event and we executed it well. We needed to deliver a good user experience for the customer to maximise opportunity, in-take and reactivation.

eGR: What do you feel worked well in particular during the World Cup?

HT: We were very active in the offering we were able to give during the tournament including items like scorecast and handicaps, and we had a lot of interest in the new bet offers that we provided. We had over 300 bet offers on pre-match events and over 200 on live betting, so we had a really strong offering which helped us a lot. We have a strong position in Netherlands and France, and having those countries in the tournament go quite far was good for acquisition and reactivation.

eGR: What’s the plan for maintaining those customers you acquired?

HT: That is the big question. We expected to get a significant increase in intake and activity and tried to maximise the value for the longer term. We’ve seen historically that when we spend money in connection with the World Cup and the activity we get from local investment, we see that there usually is an upsurge in activity later in Q4 and we expect that to happen now. We’ve seen continued strong activity recently including from the football tournament in the US, the Swedish football league, while the Danish Super League has just started and the Premier League is only a few weeks away.

eGR: Do you have any plans for a big marketing push in the UK now the football season is set to start?

HT: In the UK we’ve done more in secondary sports, which is part of our strategy for approaching the market as we try to find places where it’s less cluttered where we want to be the first choice. We’ve tried to be a bit cleverer and so far we’ve seen very good return in the UK, we’ve been doubling the business on a yearly basis which is what we expected. But we’ve been investing more than we are generating in the top-line and we expect that to continue for a couple of years. We’ve been increasing our presence in different channels and events, and doing more activity on TV. It always starts with intake, then increased activity and then an increase in turnover. We appreciate that we are coming to the UK market relatively late and are relatively unknown still, but we believe our values and our communication should work well in doubling the business on a yearly basis.

eGR: How big could the Netherlands be for Unibet and how disappointed were you that the government settled on a 20% tax on profits?

HT: We have a market-leading position and we’d certainly expect to keep that. We have been arguing our case strongly and are confident that we have strong logic to support our argument and we think it’s a missed opportunity for the government. We can’t really understand why they are actively missing out on an opportunity to channel more than 95% of the customers into the system instead of just 60% or 70%, leaving [out] up to 400,000 customers. This begs the question of what the underlying interest really is here? Is it really to protect the citizens? If so, they should go for a lower tax rate. We realise that there are a lot of vested interests which could tempt people to be more short term but we are fully convinced that 10% would provide maximum channelisation.

eGR: What will be Unibet’s main focus for the rest of the year?

HT: Maintaining high activity levels that we gained in the first half of the year and carrying that into the new season and Q4 especially. There are so many different sports and leagues that we can offer, and we have a growth initiative in re-regulated markets. We aim to continue to develop according to our plan in the UK and Australian markets. There are also general elections in Sweden in September and it will be interesting to see what the outcome of that will be. We will continue to work with the EGBA and RGA to really develop our sector in the best way possible. There’s certainly no shortage of things for us to do.