Online Casino Gambling: Amaya Says PokerStars Revenue Down In 2016Company Announces Fourth-Quarter Earnings |
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PokerStars was down last year.
Amaya, owner of the world’s largest poker platform, announced its fourth-quarter earnings this week. The company said that real-money online poker revenues for the quarter were $217.2 million, a decline of 5.1 percent year-over-year. Poker revenue for all of 2016 was $846.1 million, a decrease of 4.6 percent compared to 2015.
PokerStars has about 70 percent of the worldwide online poker market, but it operates in just one U.S. state (New Jersey). For years the company has been lobbying elsewhere in America, including California.
According to Amaya, excluding the impact of year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates, online poker revenues would have decreased by about one percent for the quarter and remained flat for the year.
“Amaya continues to see a positive impact from its previously announced strategy of focusing on recreational players, including through changes to its online poker loyalty program and rake structure, and certain adjustments to the poker ecosystem despite the year-over-year declines,” the company said.
Amaya has more than 100 million registered online poker players.
In 2015, poker accounted for 82.7 percent of total company revenue. It was 73.2 percent last year. Amaya had $1.15 billion in sales last year, up 7.8 percent compared to the $1.07 billion from 2015.
Online casino games other than poker are driving the company’s growth.
Despite record annual revenue for Amaya, profit for Q4 was 53 cents a share, which missed the average analyst projection of 56 cents, Bloomberg reported.
“2016 was a record year of revenues for Amaya,” CEO Rafi Ashkenazi said in a statement. “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.”
The company said it acquired 2.6 million registered gamblers in Q4 of last year. Over the last six months, PokerStars has averaged about 12,500 cash game players, according to tracking from PokerScout.
Amaya said that through the first two months of 2017 total revenue of about $215.3 million was 13.3 percent more than during the same period last year. Through February, real-money online poker revenue accounted for under 70 percent of total revenue.
The company’s poker site could take a hit this year thanks to Australia, one of the largest gambling markets in the world, passing a law this month to effectively ban online poker. PokerStars said earlier this year that it might leave the market.
Amaya founder and former CEO David Baazov is scheduled to go to trial this fall over insider trading allegations related to the company’s $4.9 billion takeover of PokerStars in 2014. Baazov recently sold nearly $100 million of Amaya stock. The insider trading investigation was the largest of its kind in Canadian history.
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