Online Poker Firm Party Gaming Delivers Again
Published: Tuesday, April 18, 2006 Online-Casinos.com
ONLINE POKER FIRM PARTY GAMING DELIVERS AGAIN
Revenues from casino games jump sevenfold - and look out for online backgammon
soon
Anticipation that Party Gaming's run of success would continue (see previous
Online-Casinos.com & InfoPowa reports) was confirmed this week with another
stellar set of results from the largest and most successful online poker and
casino gambling group.
The Gibraltar-based company revealed that first-quarter sales climbed 54
percent as advertisements helped the company sign up more customers.
Revenue rose to $342.6 million from $222.6 million a year earlier, Party Gaming
said in a Regulatory News Service statement. The number of new online poker
players rose 23 percent, and 39 percent of them were located outside the
U.S., where Internet gambling's legal status is uncertain.
Marketing campaigns, particularly in Europe, helped to boost the number of poker
players, PartyGaming said. The company also started running its first foreign-language
Web sites in the quarter and in addition to English now offers PartyPoker in
six languages including French and German. The introduction of backgammon is
"imminent," according to the statement.
"The first quarter has seen continued strong growth in poker on the back
of a record number of poker sign-ups,'' Finance Director Martin Weigold
said in the statement.
Sales from online casino games jumped almost sevenfold to $83.1 million, or
about a quarter of total revenue, swelled by the introduction of blackjack in
October and the PartyCasino Web site earlier this year.
The number of new online poker players climbed to 263,254 from 214,108 a year
earlier. The number of new customers for online casino games fell 23 percent
to 11,024 from 14,304.
Gambling investors will be pleased at the impact of the results. The stock
rose 6.75 pence, or 4.7 percent, to 151.75 pence in London. Investors originally
paid 116 pence each for the shares when PartyGaming, which has a market value
of about 6 billion pounds ($10.6 billion), first sold shares to the public in
June 2005.
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