Superbet shares financial results after a successful EURO. The bookmaker’s strategy is working!

Superbet’s strategy

According to the adopted strategy, the key to success on the Polish market was to build up the appropriate scale as quickly as possible in terms of turnover (amount of bets accepted), as well as customer acquisition. This was helped by innovations introduced to the ossified market, such as free-to-play games that do not require a financial contribution, Superprzewaga, which saves betting slips when one of the parties leads regardless of the final result, or Supersocial, a social functionality in the bookmaker’s mobile app that allows players to inspire each other with their bets.

Starting from a market share of around 1% just four years ago, today the bookmaker is celebrating expanding its ‘slice of the pie’ to 22% and achieving profitability that allows it to self-fund. Thus, Superbet is not only the most dynamically growing entity on the Polish bookmaking market, but also a stable company that can boast good financial results.

Łukasz Seweryniak – General Manager Superbet Poland

– We have behind us record results during the European football championships. Our results in terms of the number of active customers, the acquisition of new accounts, as well as players returning to us are a huge source of pride. But this was not a one-off shot, we entered the year as the second player in the online market, we can boast after the first quarter of this year a share of more than 22 per cent and, above all, after seven months the company has achieved a significant EBITDA operating profit. For us, this is proof of the right path we have taken. The company generated a cumulative operating profit for 7 months of 2024 in the amount of over PLN 20 million, at the same time paying the State Treasury the amount of PLN 200 million as gaming tax for this period, reveals Łukasz Seweryniak.

Fast track to the top

Superbet, although part of a strong international group operating successfully in many markets and with the strategic backing of the powerful Blackstone investment fund, started with online operations in Poland as a newcomer in 2020. Initially, it was one of the smaller operators, but thanks to its dynamic development both in terms of product (award-winning best mobile app on the market), marketing (unorthodox advertising campaigns and cooperation with recognisable ambassadors such as Jerzy Dudek) and business (building a strong team, ready to achieve ambitious goals), after four years it can look down on most of its competitors, while enjoying achieving profitability and making a profit after 7 months of 2024.

– Looking at our current situation, we can speak of a profitable, healthy business with huge potential for further growth. Achieving the right levels in turnover and the number of active customers to allow operational scaling of the business is a key element necessary to achieve stable profitability in the betting industry and to ensure further dynamic organic growth on the basis of adequate brand recognition. We have managed to build this together thanks to the successful strategy we adopted at the start of the business, which is now bearing fruit, even though there were doubts in the industry for a long time about the path we had chosen. Today we can boldly say that we were right” – explains the General Manager of Superbet Polska.

“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. In the end you win” – these words of Mahatma Gandhi can easily be applied to how Superbet was perceived by competitors in Poland.

– To put it in a tongue-in-cheek way, we are now somewhere between the third and fourth points, laughs Seweryniak and adds: – “It’s just a pity that all the market players, instead of focusing on competing with each other which would benefit the players, also have to fight against archaic legislation that deters large companies from Poland and forces more operators to close down. This year alone, several more operators have had to withdraw from our country because of tax laws created in the early 1990s”.

Players pushed into the grey market

The as much as 12 per cent turnover tax in force in our country, i.e. on each stake placed, is a phenomenon on a European scale. Operators have been calling on successive governments for years to change the taxation method to a GGR, or gross margin tax, which is the leading solution in other countries. The current legislation was drafted in the early 1990s, when few had ever heard of the internet.

The world has changed, the legislation has remained, and the result is that the state budget loses out through lower tax revenues, because a large proportion of gamblers choose to play online with illegal, unlicensed foreign bookmakers who do not provide security for players and do not pay taxes in our country.

– Honest, licensed bookmakers face such competition in an uneven fight. This makes it all the more difficult to achieve profitability. This situation effectively deters many companies from Poland, which results, for example, in less support for Polish sport, whose leading sponsors are bookmaking companies. Superbet is the main sponsor of Lech Poznań, Górnik Zabrze and GKS Katowice, and we also sponsor Wisła Kraków, the Polish Ski Association and the largest chess and darts tournaments in our part of Europe. However, things could be even better in terms of sponsorship. The current legal structure makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for most operators on the Polish market to build an operationally viable company from scratch. That is why our road to success was so difficult and required huge financial outlays, which not everyone understood, says Seweryniak.

Global strength

Success in our market would not have been possible without the support of the Superbet Group, which is increasingly bold about its global ambitions. Already today, apart from Poland, it is successfully operating in markets such as Brazil, Belgium, Romania and Serbia, planning to fight for the position of a global superpower in sports entertainment in the coming years. It is enough to look at Superbet’s sponsorship portfolio to understand that these plans are not pipe dreams.

NBA MVP Nikola Jokić, Romanian Golden Eleven legends Gheorge Hagi, Ilie Dumitrescu, Gheorge Popescu – clubs such as Anderlecht, Rapid and Dinamo Bucharest, Sao Paulo, Fluminense or America MG headed by the legendary Romario – are all part of the SuperTeam that is helping to conquer more local markets, enabling further expansion.

– We look with pride at the development of the entire group and we are very happy that the Polish way is being set as a model in more countries where Superbet appears. However, we certainly do not intend to rest on our laurels. We have very interesting sporting months ahead of us. In our opinion, interest in sports betting will continue to grow in the second half of the year, despite a very successful EURO for us. The new season promises to be exciting, and we have worked well in the preparation period and are preparing together with our customers to fight for the championship, Seweryniak concludes.