Italy iGaming Dashboard – September 2017: Lottomatica retakes casino lead from PokerStars

Lottomatica moved back ahead of PokerStars in Italy’s most lucrative vertical of online casino last month, according to estimates exclusively provided to iGaming Business by leading gaming sector advisory firm Ficom Leisure.

The operator increased its share of the €44.83m casino and slots revenue generated by operators within the regulated dot.it market in August to 9.1% from 8.5% in July, enough to edge it ahead of the poker leader’s 8.9%.

PokerStars had claimed the top spot in June little more than two years after launching casino in the market.

Total gross gaming revenue (GGR) generated by all products in the regulated dot.it market reached €96.96m in August, marginally up on July's total of €95.79m, with casino accounting for 46.2% of this, sports betting for 40.3%, poker for 11.4% (cash games and tournaments) and bingo for 2.1%. 

Planetwin365 continued to make inroads into Bet365’s lead in online sports betting, its 15.93% share of the €39.1m generated by Italian bettors less than two percentage points behind Bet365’s 17.6%, the latter representing a significant fall on the 20.6% the Stoke-headquartered claimed in July.

Senior partner at Ficom, Christian Tirabassi, commented: “The online sports betting GGR generated by operators in Italy continues to grow steadily month on month, reaching €39m in August, thus maintaining the upward trend of the overall online betting and gaming market in Italy.”

Planetwin365 also broke into the top 10 casino operators for the first time with a 3.1% market share, as well as the top three cash poker operators, with 6.28%. Planetwin365's poker room runs on B3W’s The Hive network.

PokerStars inevitably retained its huge lead in poker tournaments (70.8%) and ring games (45.9%), with the next largest operators back on 5.4% (Sisal) and 7.1% (Lottomatica) respectively.

Click on the drop down options below to compare how Italy's igaming market has performed on a monthly or annual basis. Revenue figures for online-only sports betting start from October 2016, with operator market shares from May 2017.

All data and figures are provided by leading European corporate advisory firm Ficom Leisure, a specialist in all segments of the betting and gaming sector.