Proprietary platform drives Stride Gaming’s 21% revenue growth
Real-money revenues from the operator’s in-house platform soar 55% in H1 while social gaming revenues plummet 24%
Stride Gaming this morning reported a 21% year-on-year rise in H1 revenues after strong growth from the operator’s real-money business helped offset a “disappointing” social gaming performance.
Net gaming revenue climbed to £44m for the six months to 28 February 2017, up from £36.5m in the corresponding period last year, while adjusted EBITDA increased 20% year-on-year to £9.6m.
The uptick in revenues was largely driven by a 55% rise in real-money revenues from the soft gaming operator’s proprietary platform, compared to a 4% increase from brands on third-party platforms.
Real-money gaming now accounts for 89% of total group revenues after revenues from Stride’s social gaming business slumped 24% year-on-year to £4.7m, causing an impairment of £10.2m.
However, Stride said the recent performance of its social gaming business had been “encouraging” following recent strategic changes.
“The disappointing performance is in part we believe as a result of changing dynamics in the social gaming markets which are maturing and are leading to higher acquisition costs and lower lifetime values of players,” non-executive chairman, Nigel Payne, said.
“The board continues to work hard on improving the performance of this vertical and is working both on an improvement plan as well as reassessing the relevance of the social gaming vertical.”
Eitan Boyd, CEO of Stride Gaming
Stride Gaming also completed the “successful integration” of a number of assets the company acquired in recent months which helped increase its share of the UK bingo market from 5% to 10%.
“The first half of this year has been focused on embedding the transformational acquisitions of 8Ball, Netboost Media and the Tarco Assets into the business and on strengthening our foundations,” Eitan Boyd, CEO of Stride Gaming, said.
He added: “Now with material scale, over 100 brands and being the fourth largest online bingo operator in the UK following these acquisitions, we firmly believe that the organic growth opportunity for the enlarged Group is substantial.
“Our strategic focus for the remainder of 2017 is on fully exploiting the potential of our core real-money gaming vertical.”
Today’s financial results come just days after the operator announced the launch of a new B2B division, Stride Together, with bricks and mortar casino Aspers Group becoming its first customer.
Stride Gaming’s share price was down 3.23% to 225.00p at the time of writing.