Swedish gaming revenue up 5% in Q1
Swedish gaming revenue hit SEK6.25bn (€615.3m) in the first quarter.
Sweden.- Gross gaming revenue (GGR) for Sweden’s first quarter hit SEK6.25bn (€615.3m). That’s a rise of 5 per cent year-on-year but a decline of 8 per cent from the last quarter of 2020.
Commercial online gambling operators generated SEK3.94bn, up 7.4 per cent year-on-year. State lottery and slot operators brought in SEK1.40bn, up 24 per cent. Revenue from lotteries for public benefit purposes fell 0.3 per cent to SEK858m.
Bingo games for public benefit purposes brought in SEK44m, while restaurant casinos contributed SEK6m, down from SEK52m in the first quarter of 2020.
Svenska Spel’s Casino Cosmopol monopoly on land-based casinos reported no revenue since venues remain closed owing to Covid-19 countermeasures.
Casinos have been closed since March 2020. In Q1 2020, Casino Cosmopol generated GGR of SEK196m
Compared to the last quarter of 2020, revenue from commercial online gambling was down 6 per cent, revenue from state lottery and slot operators was down 9.3 per cent, and revenue from lottery games for public benefit purposes was down 12.6 per cent.
The Swedish gaming regulator Spelinspektionen said close to 63,000 people were using the country’s Spelpaus.se self-exclusion register at the end of Q1 – an increase of more than 6 per cent against the previous quarter.
It reported that 101 companies had active licences in the Swedish market, 71 of them online.
Swedish horserace betting operator ATG reports Q1 revenue up by 11%
AB Trav och Galopp (ATG), the former monopoly operator of horserace betting in Sweden, has reported that its Q1 revenue rose 11 per cent year-on-year to SEK1.46bn (€144.2m).
Net gaming revenue came in at SEK1.27bn with agent revenue contributing SEK64m and other revenue the remainder.
The majority of revenue came from Sweden – SEK1.04bn from horseracing betting and SEK129m from sports betting.
Casino gaming contributed SEK60m, down 23.1 per cent year-on-year as a result of Sweden’s temporary deposit cap on online casino gaming. In December, ATG was sanctioned by the Swedish gambling regulator for allowing players to evade the cap.
The numbers mark a solid start to the year after ATG reported record net revenue of SEK5.35bn (€525.7m) for 2020.
CEO Hasse Lord Skarplöth said: “Now that we are entering the second quarter, we will most likely see a break in the trend regarding ATG’s percentage growth in comparison with last year.
“The competitive situation in 2021, where the range of sports betting is now in full swing, is completely different compared to a year ago when sport basically stood still.”
Swedish gambling regulator fines LeoVegas and ATG
Last month, Spelinspektionen fined LeoVegas SEK2m (€197,000) due to anti-money laundering (AML) failings and ATG the same amount over bonus violations.
The fine issued against LeoVegas comes after the Swedish regulator asked for information on its 15 customers with the highest winnings from the launch of the Swedish online gambling market in January 2019 to November 30 of the same year.
The regulator found that for 11 of those customers that it deemed to present a risk of money laundering, information in customers’ files, such as estimates of the values of their home and cars, were misdated and in one case were missing completely.
The Swedish regulator has also issued a fine of SEK2m to ATG for breaching Sweden’s temporary rules on bonuses, which allow operators to only offer bonuses as introductory offers.
The operator had self-reported a breach through which, for 48 hours in October, players who bought bingo tokens received free extra tokens.
Meanwhile, Spelinspektionen has asked the government to provide clarification on the proposed extension of the country’s temporary SEK5,000 (€492) cap on online casino deposits.
