BetMGM set up to “compete digitally” in international markets, bosses insist  

MGM Resorts International interactive president Gary Fritz believes market conditions are favourable enough to allow the online operator to compete anywhere in the world.

The Las Vegas-based casino group’s fourth quarter and full-year 2024 results showed digital’s net revenue stood at $140m (£112m), a 15% year-on-year (YoY) increase from the $122m recorded for the equivalent period a year prior.

The operator attributed this to entry into new markets, having launched BetMGM in Sweden in October and added a sportsbook to its LeoVegas brand in Germany the following month. Subsidiary LeoVegas Group also rolled out BetMGM in the Netherlands in April 2024.

On an analyst call following the results, Fritz was asked about the scale of BetMGM’s digital investment. In response, he highlighted the June 2024 acquisition of Tipico’s US sportsbook platform and the partnership with supplier Push Gaming in December as recent examples of the operator’s ongoing attempts to compete digitally.

Adding that market conditions are “favourable”, Fritz said once “innovation” is complete later this year, the operator will better its chances of competing globally.

The president remarked: “We’ve been hard at work at MGM Digital in the past couple of years. We’ve been assembling a distribution network and a product platform that we believe gives us a great opportunity to compete digitally.

“We’ve completed, principally completed, our capital deployment programme. As I think Bill [Hornbuckle] has mentioned in the past, we’ve spent about $1bn against the Leo[Vegas] business, building out the proprietary content development capabilities to Push [Gaming] and more recently the acquisition of the sportsbook platform via Tipico’s US assets.

“We’re happy where we’ve ended up with all of that that. We’re hard at work integrating all of those assets together to create a platform and a set of player experiences that allow us to compete really anywhere in the world.

“We think market conditions are favourable. We should have that innovation complete by the end of the first half of this year. In fact, we are going live next week with our first market on the fully integrated stack and we’re excited about the innovation that unlocks and our increasing ability to compete.”

That live market launch Fritz referred to is Brazil, where BetMGM was one of 14 operators handed a definitive licence when the Brazilian market went live at the start of 2025.

In the South American country, where MGM Resorts International partnered with Brazilian media giant Grupo Globo to run a JV in the market, Fritz confirmed the full launch will take place next week following a soft launch last month.

He noted: “It’s early days in Brazil. We’re very happy with our partnership with Globo. We soft launched there in January when the market liberalised and we’re scheduled for our full media hard launch next week.

“We’ve built a local management team on the ground in Brazil. It’s a $7bn TAM, we believe, in Brazil, and we’re excited to compete there on a level playing field.”

In regard to launching in other markets and potentially treating LeoVegas and Push Gaming as standalone businesses, Fritz noted that while both would be “highly profitable”, the plan remains to “invest in organic growth against the BetMGM brand in a select handful of markets in Europe”, specifically the UK, Netherlands and Sweden.

He stressed that unless the operator could secure 5% of the market upon entering it, attacking the jurisdiction would not be worth it.

Fritz said: “Our early trading results in 2025 suggests that those investments are going well. Growth is strong and we believe the operating losses associated with the market entries are going to narrow throughout 2025, setting us up with a really strong exit rate and a meaningful opportunity for operational inflection going into 2026.

“I think we try to calibrate our market share target to the relative maturity of the market and competitive intensity and whether or not we have the strength of our value proposition in any given market.

“So, [it would] be hard to say that we have a uniform target across everything. That being said, I don’t think it’s worth attacking or entering a market if our goal wasn’t to get at least 5% in any given market we entered.”

In the operator’s published results, MGM Digital is expected to target a 1% to 5% market share in Europe and over 10% in Brazil, with addressable TAM of $34bn and $7bn, respectively.

Group revenue for FY 2024 was $2.1bn, up 7% YoY, with igaming revenue increasing 13% to $1.5bn and online sports revenue growing 4% to $554m.

Net revenue for retail slumped 40% YoY to $70m, with EBITDA falling 294% to a negative $244m.