Casino drives 8% jump in Amaya 2016 revenues
Poker revenues continue to fall although PokerStars-owner lauds recreational focus as player numbers climb
Amaya has reported a 7.8% rise in annual revenues to $1.15bn, as growth in casino and sports continued to offset a slight decline in poker.
Poker revenues in Q4 were down 5% year-on-year (-1%cc) to $217m, although Amaya said it “continued to see a positive impact” from its strategy of focusing on recreational players, despite the year-over-year decline.
The benefit could be seen in the number of users, with real-money poker quarterly active uniques (QAUs) up 5% year-on-year to 2.5 million in Q4.
Elsewhere, sportsbook and casino revenues for Q4 increased approximately 57% year-on-year to $80m.
Online casino QAUs grew 47% to 648,000, which Amaya described as “one of the largest casino player bases among its competitors”, while sportsbook QAUs offerings hit 247,000, an 88% increase.
The figures were reflected in Amaya’s diminishing reliance on poker, with the vertical accounting for 73% of revenues for FY16, 70% for Q4, and 69% so far in 2017.
By contrast, sportsbook and casino combined grew from 23% of revenues in FY16 to 27% so far in 2017.
Adjusted EBITDA for the full year grew 18% to $524m, as the firm continued to implements its operational excellence programme which included restructurings in offices in London, Sydney and Dublin.
“2016 was a record year of revenues for Amaya,” said Amaya CEO Rafi Ashkenazi.
“Our proactive changes to the poker ecosystem and customer acquisition initiatives continue to reverse certain negative trends and we are starting to see organic growth in that business, our casino offering exceeded expectations as we introduced limited marketing campaigns and focused on our cross-sell efforts, and we continued to build and develop our sportsbook.”
In the first two months of 2017, the Toronto-listed firm said revenues were up around 13% to $215m compared to the same period last year.