Greek gambling monopoly posts sales growth

OPAP revealed that during the first quarter of the year revenue grew 5.3 percent to US$603 million.

Greece.- After a rough 2016 for the Greek betting and lottery monopoly operator OPAP, as their profits fell almost one-fifth, the company revealed that the first quarter of 2017 has brought US$603 million in sales, a 5.3 percent increase and up from the US$380 million registered in 2016.

Whilst overall the results were good for OPAP, EBITDA fell 0.4 percent to US$87.9 million, down from the US$88.2 million experienced during the same three month period in 2016. The company believes that the fall is due to the implementation of new projects, and development expenses that are linked with VLTs, as iGamingBusiness revealed.

Lotteries increased their revenue by 10.9 percent, and sports betting followed the results with a 6.9 percent. Damian Cope, the  company’s chief executive, said: “Despite the challenges of the domestic economic environment, OPAP managed to achieve meaningful Q1 GGR growth, aided by robust lottery games performance and continuing scratch tickets growth. At the same time our operating profitability stood marginally higher, despite the additional expenses related to the implementation of our new projects.”

“Operationally, we are progressing at full speed with the delivery of our strategic priorities – virtual games have been introduced across our entire retail network with an encouraging early performance, our VLTs rollout is fully under way, our technology transformation programme is picking up pace while the new agents’ commission structure has been effective since April. For the rest of 2017 we will continue to build on what has already been accomplished so far this year to ensure that we remain on track to achieve the delivery of our ‘2020 Vision’,” he added.