Despite many non-American poker players forced to leave Full Tilt worldwide, bwin.party wasn't able to attract many of them. The blame was placed on the marketing juggernaut that is PokerStars who seemed to capture most of the traffic from Full Tilt Poker shutting down worldwide. There was only a 4% rise in Q2 since Black Friday.
Bwin.party admitted that the important Italian market also suffered a slowdown prior to the launch of cash games in July. Officials are optimistic that the launch of cash games in Italy should drive growth in poker since bwin.party's Gioco Digitale brand one of the largest operators in the country.
Ryan mentioned the potential re-entering of the US market by working with land based brands that would be a key driver of growth in the future. Already, local partners intend to advance regulation at both a state and federal level, and they are in the final stages of negotiations with partners in New Jersey, California and at the national level.
Ryan added that another positive outcome, the sale of bwin's B2B poker network Ongame was on schedule to be completed by the end of 2011.
"We plan to migrate all of the bwin poker player base to the PartyPoker platform as soon as practicable and expect that dotcom, .fr, and .it players will be migrated by the end of the third quarter of 2012."
As for overall results, bwin.party reported pro-forma EBITDA was down 21% to €81.9 million, with much of that blamed on the poor poker environment due to competition, increased gaming duties from regulated markets and the closure of the French casino.The casino business has become the main profit center, despite efforts to cross sell to poker players and reported EBITDA of €37.7 million in the period.
