Better Collective has described the opportunity thrown up by the repeal of PASPA as “potentially the biggest growth driver in the years to come”. This comment was made as the firm published its Q3 2018 results, which included revenue growth of 68%, organic revenue growth of 15% and an EBITDA before special items increase of 69%.
CEO Jesper Søgaard said: “In Q3, we continued to recognise significant and profitable growth, where we, once again, managed to increase the operational earnings-margin, while at the same time launching a number of new US focused products.
“I am very pleased with the significant growth in NDCs (New Depositing Customers) – a growth that was disproportionately higher compared to the revenue growth. As most NDCs are on revenue-share based contracts I expect this to support future growth.”
Describing the US as “potentially the biggest growth driver in the years to come”, Søgaard also pointed to the first revenues generated from the newly liberalised market in Q3. The main sites generating US depositors were US-Bookies and Bet-NJ.
“While the “PASPA-act” was repealed by the US Supreme Court last quarter, no longer preventing sports betting in a broader scale, this quarter has generated the first sports betting revenue to us from US operators,” he continued.
“The vast number and variety of stakeholders currently preparing to make their mark on the US sports betting markets as the individual states start regulating is a testament to the expected size of the market, once fully regulated.
“In Better Collective, we have been preparing for entering the US market for quite some time and we already have US-focused products in place which generated the first revenue streams late in the quarter.
“While we do not expect organic growth to do it alone, we believe that Better Collective has a unique offering in terms of technology and know-how in order to find attractive business in this new and potentially very big market. My expectation is that we will create new business organically as well as through collaborations and acquisitions.”
In terms of a US strategy, Søgaard stressed the fact that there is still a degree of caution: “The US market is definitely a priority for us that we continue to monitor closely. We have products available in the states that are currently open for sports betting.
“Since it is a new market, we are being cautious in how we approach it to ensure that we are always compliant, yet we have definitive plans to build an organisation on the ground over there during 2019.”
Søgaard also emphasised the importance of US trading on Better Collective’s bettingexpert.com subsidiary: “Even before PASPA was repealed, the USA was one of our top 5 largest traffic sources on bettingexpert.com.
“The traffic was never monetised due to regulation, but our users over there enjoyed the community aspect of tipping on sports. Now that we can monetise bettingexpert.com state-by-state as they regulate, we are making sure that our products are adapted to the American betting culture.
“We’ve taken extensive measures to make sure that our sites are approachable to our American users. This includes sending our Product Experience team on missions to the US to do research so that we can apply their findings to our products.
“The American betting culture is very different from ours in Europe, and we want to make sure that our users are given the best guidance possible in a language and experience that they understand.”
