The UK’s largest bookie has pledged its continued support of the world’s oldest association cup trophy with a new seven-figure deal ahead of the expiry of its current agreement next year. The sponsorship will now run until 2016.

William Hill’s chief marketing officer Kristof Fahy said the gambling giant was “very exicted” about inking a new deal with the Scottish FA, and said it was looking forward in working with the SFA, fans and clubs “to make this great competition even bigger and better”.

The chief executive of the SFA, Stewart Regan, added that it was “reassuring” in a tough financial climate for Scottish football that a leading UK brand of Hill’s stature had demonstrated its continued support of the national game.

The new deal agreement will enable the bookmaker to raise the profile of its online, mobile and retail products among fans of Scottish football throughout the UK.

This year’s edition of the William Hill Scottish Cup will be contested between Hibs and Celtic at Hampden Park this coming Sunday.

The bookie is also the official betting partner of the English FA Cup until 2014 under a two-and-a-half-year-deal agreed last year.

Article written by Stephen Carter

Sheriff has a huge range of 3D slot games and table games, including the Mega Money Pool portfolio of games, all of which will become available to a wider audience as they are rolled out across the online casinos operated by SkillOnNet, including PlayMillion.com, EUCasino.com and VegasWinner.com.

SkillOnNet’s Acquisition Chief, Andy Andrew, commented: “Our ethos is to provide our casino customers with a breadth of high quality games that will engage their players and also encourage loyalty.

“Sheriff Gaming’s feature rich 3D content will be added to our own hugely successful 3D Slots games catalogue providing a great tool for increasing conversion.”

Sheriff Gaming’s spokesperson Eric Roskamp said: “We are really pleased to be working alongside SkillOnNet which has developed a great reputation within the industry for offering sophisticated software solutions to a wide range of successful online casinos.

“We are positive that our advancements in 3D game technology will be a fantastic addition to SkillOnNet’s game portfolio.”

Paddy Power sky writing at 2012 Ryder Cup

Paddy Power’s revenues from mobile sports betting have more than doubled in 2013 to account for 42% of its entire business, the Irish operator has revealed.

Chairman Nigel Northridge said the company’s “industry leading” position in sports betting on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, which was up 112% in the period from 1 January to 12 May, had complemented the strengths of Paddy Power’s flagship online arm and online-only Australia division, where it operates under the Sportsbet brand.

Italy, where Paddy Power operates online sports betting and online casino within the ring-fenced dot.it market, contributed 3% of the 30% growth of online during the period.

CEO Patrick Kennedy was however forced to defend the company’s Italian foray at the company’s AGM yesterday, in the wake of a downgrade by Dublin-based Davy Stockbrokers last month which wiped €150m off the share price, since largely recovered.

Kennedy told shareholders that he disagreed with the conclusion of analysts David Jennings and Simon McGrotty that Paddy Power faced diminishing margins from its UK and Irish business, and that it would take longer to become profitable in Italy than originally projected.

The Paddy Power boss insisted that the Italian market remained a strong prospect, arguing that rising broadband penetration and the company’s mastery of social media would help support growth, according to Independent.ie.

The company accounted for 6% of the €23m in gross gaming revenue generated by Italian punters on nationally regulated sites in March 2013, according to regulator AAMS’ figures, making it the sixth largest operator in the market. Its share of the €20.4m online casino segment was just 1.49% however.

Article written by Stephen Carter

Betfred has announced the launch of a single mobile gaming platform that will combine all of its mobile betting facilities. The company already owns a number of mobile gaming apps, including Goals Galore and Virtual Sports, but the brand new Mobile Sportsbook will form a simpler and more streamlined offering for the mobile gaming market.

This release comes just a few short months after Betfred launched its mobile gaming facility, which it developed with Playtech, enabling all gamers using Android and iOS devices to enjoy its wide range of gambling products.

The Mobile Sportsbook app was developed in house to give the company the most flexibility, while Betfred’s Head of Mobile Development, Andrew Daniels, commented that this enables the company to continue to develop “the best mobile product in the market”.

He said: “we will be no longer reliant on a third party, meaning we can drive the product and give customers what they want. Ultimately, having our own platform means we can punch above our weight.”

Along with the new platform, there are more changes in the pipeline for Betfred, which will see the company pushing forward to establish itself as a leader in the mobile market. Head of Betfred Mobile, Stuart Magowan, said: “We’ve enjoyed some major developments over the course of the last year or so, but we will continue to strive towards establishing Betfred Mobile as a best of breed among mobile platforms.”

Betfair will not however be able to launch until its platform has been certified and approved under the new regulations, with IT agency SOGEI only due to start user-based testing in July, Italian online gambling regulator AAMS announced Wednesday.

Under the new regulations, operators will be able to charge up to 10% commission on matched bets, with this taxed at 20% by the Italian government. The minimum stake for “back” and “lay” bets placed by players will be 50 euro cents, with maximum winnings per bet capped at €10,000.

The profit tax to be levied on exchange betting, due to its non-viability under the stakes-based regime currently applied to all fixed-odds sports betting in Italy, has drawn complaints from conventional sportsbook operators that this lower effective tax rate will enable Betfair and others to offer punters far more competitive prices.

The fixed odds sports betting market has performed erratically in recent years, as operators have struggled to gain traction against offshore sites due to a high turnover tax and a limited choice of betting events and markets, even generating an overall loss in September last year.

But the strength of Betfair’s offer in Italy may also be hindered by not being able to tap into its international liquidity, with the new regulations restricting licensed dot.it operators to Italian punters at this point in time.

The regulations do however favour the London-listed business in terms of building a dominant position within the ring-fenced market, given they appear not to allow operators to form networks and pool liquidity.

Italian software provider and network Microgame, which first revealed plans to launch an exchange betting product back in 2010, announced its intention last year to roll out its People’s IBEX platform, developed with Betdaq operator Global Betting Exchange, to its client base of 160 licensees.

Italian sports betting operators will soon be able to offer a wider range of markets under a new protocol, boosting their attractiveness to Italian bettors drawn to offshore dot.com sites offering around ten times the number of football markets available on Italian-licensed sportsbooks.

Article written by Peter Holmes

According to figures published by the Danish Gambling Authority, the dot.dk market generated revenues of DK610m (£69.1m) in the first three months of 2013, representing year-on-year growth of 30% on the DK470m generated in the comparable quarter a year earlier.

The figure was also the market’s largest quarterly return to date, up 3.4% on Q4 of 2012.

Licensed operators, which include bet365, bwin.party, Ladbrokes and most of Europe’s leading pan-European businesses, generated DK370m (£42m) in gross gaming revenues for betting (both retail and online) and DK240m (£27.2m) for online casino, including poker.

The Danish regulator also for the first time split out the contribution from online poker, from which revenues from licensed operators were DK55m (£6.2m), flat on the previous quarter.

The performance contrasted with that of the only other national dot.country market to have published first-quarter figures to date, France, where GGR remained flat year-on-year due to the ongoing deterioration of the cash poker segment.

The Danish market, limited to adults living in the 5.6 million population country, was worth the equivalent of €82m in Q1, compared to €188m in 65.4 million-population France, although direct comparisons are difficult given Denmark’s figures include the contribution from retail betting and from online casino, the latter remaining unregulated in France.

Europe’s most mature and largest dot.country online gambling market, Italy, has yet to publish its full first-quarter metrics. Regulator AAMS has however announced spending remained broadly stable at €2.2bn, 0.2% less than in the first quarter of 2012. Online casino and sports betting market leader GTECH, nee Lottomatica, revealed revenues from Italian operations dipped to €464m from €482m.

Article written by Katy Stirland

The bookmaker, promoted to the FTSE 100 last week following a strong 12 months under Topping which saw operating profit rise 20%, said the Scot had expressed his desire to stay on as boss “until at least the end of 2015”.

Chairman Gareth Davis said in today’s AGM statement that he was “delighted” that Topping had decided to stay on “to lead the Group through this ongoing transformational period”.

The bookie recently regained full control of its William Hill Online business by buying out software provider Playtech’s 29% stake for £424m. It also acquired Sportingbet’s Australian business and an option on its Spanish arm for £459.4m in March.

Topping, who took up the reigns as CEO in June 2008 after working his way up from a Saturday job in a William Hill shop in Glasgow in 1973, said he was pleased with the progress made during the last five years and that he was “confident we have the management team in place to deliver further value.”

The William Hill board’s decision to pay Topping a £1.2m retention bonus when he last extended his contract two years ago spurred a revolt among shareholders at the company’s AGM. The remuneration package was eventually passed by a show of hands after 49.8% voted against via proxy. Topping blamed corporate governance advisors ISS for orchestrating resistance among institutional shareholders.

Topping recently set a target for the betting and gaming group to become a £5bn business within three to five years. He has argued that the US market, where the bookmaker completed a £31m takeover of three sportsbooks in Nevada last summer, “will offer us that chance for that step-up”.

Article written by Stephen Carter

The Gambling (licensing and advertising) Bill, requiring “all operators selling or advertising into the British market, whether from here or abroad” to hold a UK Gambling Commission licence, was among 19 measures the government hopes to implement during the new session of Parliament opened by the Queen this morning.

The briefing notes accompanying the Queen’s Speech today justified the Bill’s passage in terms of “providing greater consumer protection for people in Great Britain”. The proposed legislation would also “[l]evel the regulatory field for all remote operators allowing British-based operators to compete on an equal footing,” said the government.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s top Mandarin said in March that securing a third-session slot for the Bill could see the UK “commence new arrangements” for regulating remote gambling in Britain on a point-of-consumption basis as early as April 2014, ahead of the previously announced December 2014.

This date could however be compromised if the Gibraltar Betting and Gaming Association follows through on its threat to take legal action if the UK government proceeded with its plan to regulate and tax online gambling in Great Britain based on the location of customer, not company.

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee last week approved “the principle” of the Bill. It also declared itself “satisfied” that the government had considered the compatibility of the proposals with EU law, adding that: “[W]e note its confidence that any challenge to the legislation would be unlikely to succeed.”

HM Treasury has yet to confirm the level of the accompanying tax licensees will be required to pay on business generated by British consumers, however its modelling assumes a continuation of the present rate of 15% GPT.

Following the offshore exodus to Gibraltar of Ladbrokes, William Hill, Betfair and Gala Coral in recent years, Bet365 now stands alone among the UK’s major operators in paying this duty – on all of its sportsbook revenue – but has benefitted from double tax relief since April 2012, offsetting what it pays under other local licences held in territories such as Denmark, Spain, Australia and the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein.

The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee warned against setting the tax rate too high in its pre-legislative report on the Bill last week, arguing this could drive customers and companies into the unregulated market.

UK giants Ladbrokes and William Hill both called in their submissions to the Committee for the eventual tax rate to be set at 5% of gross profits, in Ladbrokes’ words “to maximise the level of compliance among operators”, with Ireland-based Paddy Power advocating for “an absorbable rate (5-8%).”

Article written by Peter Holmes

The ban issued today follows the UK regulator upholding a complaint that the ad on a social networking site, which included the text “Join Now & Get £10 Free to play with!”,  was misleading because the man and his girlfriend had joined via the ad and not received the bonus advertised.

888-owned Cassava Enterprises had defended itself against the complaint by arguing the offer was subject to clear terms and conditions on the LuckyAcePoker website, which stated it was only available to adults who “do not have any previous account with the promoter”,  Cassava Enterprises. The man and his girlfriend had previously registered accounts with other 888-owned brands, and had tried to sign up to LuckyAcePoker.com with email addresses already attached to existing accounts.

The ASA however noted that the ad made zero reference to the existence of these terms and conditions or where these could actually be found on the LuckyAcePoker website. The regulator also concluded that players were likely to understand the bonus as being on offer to all LuckyAcePoker players, and its availability only to customers who had already signed up with other Cassava-operated sites was a “significant condition” that should have been made clear in the actual ad itself.

The UK ad watchdog ruled the ad breached its CAP codes governing misleading advertising, qualification, sales promotions and significant conditions for promotions, and therefore must not appear in its current form again. LuckyAcePoker was also instructed to ensure it made clear all significant conditions of future promotions.

Article written by Katy Stirland

The regulator’s survey data on gambling participation shows that in the 12 months to the end of March 2013, an average of 15% of the 4,000 adults sampled had participated in at least one form of remote gambling in the last four weeks, up from 14% in 2012.

Excluding the National Lottery however, British adults’ participation in online gambling such as sports betting, poker, casino and bingo, remained stable at 8%, the same figure recorded for the year to the end of December 2012.

Online betting remained the most popular remote activity once lottery was omitted from the equation, with 4% of the 4,000 adults surveyed by ICM Research – based on an average of the figures for June 2012, September 2012, December 2012 and March 2013 – saying they had spent money on this activity during the last four weeks. This was up from 3% for 2012.

Overall gambling participation, including all land-based and remote forms, also rose marginally in the year to March 2013, up to 58% from 57% in 2012, according to the quarterly dataset.

Article written by Stephen Carter