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Jumbo Interactive Announces FY2020 Results

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Australian online lottery retailer Jumbo Interactive has announced its FY2020 results. The company has reported an 8.7% year-on-year growth in revenue and is now targeting growth in markets such as the UK, US and Canada as it aims to increase sales to AU$1bn. Total sales for the 12 months to 30 June amounted to AU$348.6m ($251.0m), with revenue rising from $65.2m to $71.2m.

Its core Australia Lotteries saw revenue increase 6.9% year-on-year to $68.7m, aided by a $260,000 contribution from its burgeoning software-as-a-service business, as well as large jackpots driving customer activity.

In terms of spending for the year, costs of sales were up 5.1% to $5.3m, while administrative expenses also increased 46.5% to $23.6m. However, Jumbo was able to reduce marketing costs by 19.9% to $5.6m, while occupancy expenses were cut by 86.0% to $104,000 for the year.

After taking into account $222,000 in finance costs and $176,000 in fair value movement on financial liabilities, this left Jumbo with a $37.4m profit before tax, down slightly from $38.2m at the end of its 2019 financial year.

Jumbo paid $11.5m in tax during the year, and after also including a $676,000 negative impact from foreign currency translation, this meant comprehensive profit for the year amounted to $25.2m, down 4.6% from $26.4m in 2019. However, in terms of underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, this increased by 7.7% to $43.2m.

“The online lottery industry has experienced further growth and this is expected to continue, especially as we broaden the charity lottery tickets we are now selling through our Powered by Jumbo software, which we feel will not only assist our profitability but also the deserving charities we are focusing on. We have often been asked if the Covid-19 pandemic has had an effect on our operation. With the experience of our major shareholder and CEO Mike Veverka and his very skilled staff, we have been able to continue to work both within the office and from the staffs’ respective homes,” David Barwick, chairman of Jumbo Interactive, said.

Veverka said that with online sales of lottery tickets accounting for 28% of Australian sales, the industry “clearly has a lot of growth ahead.”

“Lotteries are perfect for the internet and customers enjoy a top quality experience whether they play on OzLottries.com or another lottery using the Jumbo platform. Continual innovation is driving the customer experience even higher and is ensuring lotteries continue to remain popular into the future.”

Veverka also highlighted Jumbo signing a long-term extension to its reseller agreement with Australian lotteries and gaming operator Tabcorp, saying this will help to support its growth plans moving forward.

“The recent 10-year agreement with Tabcorp is an important milestone as it gives Jumbo certainty and the ability to plan long term. The next 10 years will be exciting as the internet share of ticket sales race up as players, young and old, enjoy the experience of playing online,” he said.

“From humble beginnings with a single computer in 1995, Jumbo has navigated many challenges and is ready for the growth that lies ahead. Our staff and partners over the years deserve enormous credit for this growth due to their efforts and trust in the vision to grow through technology,” he added.

Jumbo’s international lottery advisor Richard Bateson said that the retailer has identified opportunities for its iLottery and iRetailer solutions in the US, as more states move lotteries online.

“The iLottery proposition provides lotteries with an integrated digital lottery channel that is more efficient and effective than its industry competitors. The iRetailer proposition provides lotteries with a standalone digital channel that is self-sufficient and does not require operating cost or marketing budget to be diverted from the lottery’s main operations,” Bateson said.

“Once there is an established foothold in Canada, management believes the model can be exported to other parts of the North American region, using the expertise of the local market in adjacent markets. The international ambition is to drive sustainable businesses in the UK, the US and Canada that will be used as a beachhead in each region to grow into other markets and sectors,” Bateson added.

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Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW

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Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.

The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.

Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.

It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.

Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.

It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.

The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.

The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

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Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties

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The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.

The Court ordered:

Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.

Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.

His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.

The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.

ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.

“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.

“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”

ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.

In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:

“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”

Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that

“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that

“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”

The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

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PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale

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Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.

“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.

Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:

• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.

• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.

• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.

“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.

“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.

The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.

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