British Casino News: April 2008 Archives

Cantor Gaming, an affiliate of the global financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald, has launched CantorCasino.com - Cantor are the first financial services company to move into online gaming. The launch of Cantor Gamings online casino, is an exciting development that follows their white label B2B offering. Our view is they have gone down this route as perhaps the B2B offering is not really hitting the mark as regards numbers and profits.  It seems they have struggled somewhat to hit any major deals with it as a business.

Hitwise UK Gaming Ranking - using a snap shot of 20% of the UK online audience Hitwise monitors and ranks the size of a variety of industries online. In Feb 2008 these are the UK Gaming sites with the biggest market share of users clearly the results favour non download browser based sites.

Playtech revenues have risen over the $100m mark whilst total revenue rose 86%. Profits dropped as expenses of operating the business rose.  The company remains confident and puts the increased costs down to four areas:

Investing in new gaming markets

Developing new casino products

improving existing products such as Poker

Searching for aqusitions and new joint ventures

Casino income was king for Playtech with total product reveneues rising to US $74.7m up 58% and Poker jumped up by a huge 269%.

 

Getminted.com has just launched a fresh suite of browser based games on their no download casino site.  The games cover areas such as Wolf Run and Cleopatra well known offline branded formats as well as some updated classic casino games such as 3 Card Poker and Blackjack. 

At least 4,000 bookmakers' shops opened on Good Friday across Britain including almost all branches of Ladbrokes and Coral, despite there being no British horse racing.

The Church of England had called for bookmakers to donate some of the profits to anti-gambling charities.

Bookies can remain open as a result of last year's Gambling Act which allows bookies to trade every day except Christmas Day.

The Church of England joined with a number of other Christian groups who asked people not to bet.

In a statement the Church of England said: "We would encourage operators to keep their shops closed on Good Friday.

"But those who insist on opening will, we hope, undertake to donate a decent portion of their profits towards programmes of education, research and treatment aimed at checking the growth in problem gambling."

A spokesman for the Methodist Church said they would prefer people to think about the day's religious significance rather than placing bets.