PartyGaming has led, Betfair and FDJ will follow
PartyGaming's float and UIGEA were the two most significant events in egaming, says H2 Gambling Capital director Simon Halliday in the latest of our From Dot Com to eGaming blog posts looking back over the decade, who predicts that Betfair and Francaise Des Jeux will be next...
FROM A FINANCIAL perspective, the PartyGaming listing and UIGEA really stick out as the important points in the decade. The PartyGaming IPO was a huge milestone for the industry in terms of putting it on the financial radar.
When we were approaching investors back in February of that year, they didn’t know about the sector. After Party, they got really excited about it, it gave a real air of legitimacy to the industry.
The Sportingbet listing in 2001 was also important, but Party’s was much, much bigger. We haven’t seen much since then in terms of listings, PokerStars being probably the biggest name to cancel an IPO because of UIGEA while remaining private as a company to allow it to continue operating in the US.
UIGEA stopped everything in its tracks and split the industry in two: those that take bets from the US, and those that don’t.
I think the next listings we will see will be Betfair and Française des Jeux (FDJ), but those deals are reliant on the general financial climate picking up and FDJ is linked to the French market opening up.
The recession has had an impact across the leisure market in general, but if you look at the egaming stocks, they have generally outperformed other markets in the past 18 months.
I don’t think the US egaming regulation would in itself be a catalyst for more listings and it is also not clear who would be able to operate there.
Whether US regulation happens on a state-by-state or federal basis, no one knows when it will happen – the optimists are too optimistic, the pessimists are too pessimistic.
But when it does happen, it will be transformative. This is a decade where the sector has gone from being worth US$3bn to US$27bn. We could be at US$60bn by the end of the next decade if the US opens up.
Click here to read other posts in the From Dot Com to eGaming series from figures including Manfred Bodner, Jim Ryan and Mark Blandford.
Thoughts? EGR welcomes pitches for blog posts of 300-400 words on topical issues in egaming. Email online editor Jon Parker for details.