Italy: casino sets record total for third consecutive month

| By Stephen Carter
Online slots and casino generated record revenue of €162.85m for Italian-licensed operators in January, up 6% on the prior month and 99% up year-on-year.

Casino and slots market share leader PokerStars was the principal operator beneficiary of the vertical’s explosive growth in the past two months, collecting 11% or close to €18m of this total in January (see Chart 7).

This pushed total online GGR for the dot.it market across all products to €335.9m, only bettered by the December 2020 total (Chart 1).

In a month where betting shops remained shuttered under Covid-19 restrictions, January 2021 saw dot.it sports betting operators generate the second highest ever monthly total of €143.64m (Chart 6).

Bet365, having tumbled from first to sixth in the online betting rankings in November and December as competitors with land-based shops migrated bettors online, rebounded in January, increasing its market share by two percentage points to 12.2% over the month (Chart 8).

This was sufficient to move it back to third position behind Sisal and Snai, with respective 12.8% and 12.4% market shares.

Online poker continued its rebound under lockdown, albeit at a slower rate than in November and December, with tournament revenues growing 6% on the prior month to €12.96m and cash game revenues by 6.5% to €8.84m (Chart 2).

PokerStars commanded dominant shares of 52.9% of tournament and 43.5% of ring game GGR in January (Charts 10 and 11).

Scroll down for the infographic to track market and product growth since 2016, as well as operator shares across casino, betting and poker since 2017.