LeoVegas plans to enter Dutch regulated market in Q4

Announcing its Q2 results, the operator revealed the negative impact of its exit from the Netherlands last year.

Sweden.- LeoVegas has released its Q2 results, posting revenue of €98m. Revenue was up by just 1 per cent year-on-year, held back by the operator’s exit from the Netherlands when the regulated market launched in October 2021. It said that excluding the impact of its exit from the Netherlands, revenue was up by 9 per cent year-on-year.

However, the operator said it has applied for a Dutch licence and hopes to re-enter the Netherlands market by the end of this year. Meanwhile, in April, LeoVegas went live in Ontario, Canada.

For the second quarter, EBITDA was down 45.1 per cent year-on-year at €5.3m. Operating profit was €570,000 and net profit €407,000 – a drop of 62.4 per cent. The number of new depositing customers was down by 10.9 per cent at 158,149, although returning depositing customers rose slightly despite the Netherlands exit.

For the six months ended June 30, revenue was €196.4m, up 1.5 per cent. EBITDA was down from €43.3m to €20.2m and net profit was down 70.5 per cent at €4.6m.

MGM acquisition

LeoVegas said that its proposed acquisition by MGM was advancing “according to plan” in spite of the Swedish Economic Crime Authority’s investigation into insider trading in LeoVegas shares. The €576m deal was reached in May and the acceptance period ends on August 30.

President and CEO Gustaf Hagman said: “It seems likely that the bid will be accepted, which would lead to the company’s shares being delisted from Nasdaq Stockholm later in the year.”

He added: “The expansion project in the US and New Jersey was paused at the end of the quarter due to the ongoing bid and the initiatives and obligations that MGM already has in the US market.

“The assessment is therefore that the most responsible course of action is to pause the expansion until we know whether the bid on LeoVegas will be accepted. If a launch is made possible in the future, we will be able to resume the US expansion with a short start-up period.”

Earlier this month, the British Gambling Commission issued LeoVegas with a warning and a £1.2m penalty for social responsibility and anti-money laundering failings. The regulator found that the Swedish operator had “not sufficiently taken into account the Commission’s 2019 guidance on customer interaction” and had not enforced its policy of interacting with customers who displayed signs of gambling harm.