Italy's Snaitech Has First Profitable Year in Decade

Italian betting group Snaitech has announced their full year 2017 financial results, revealing that the company had it's first profit in a decade.

Key financial indicators for the year ending December 31st, 2017 were:

• Net profits of €27 million, up from a loss of €17 million last year
• Pre-tax profit of €41.6 million, up from a loss of €35.6 million last year
• EBITDA of €135.9 million, up 5.9% from last year
• Revenues down 1% to €135.9 million
• Online wagers up 29.9% to €9.96 billion
• Retail wagers down 2.7% to €1.19 billion, with gaming machine revenue down 4.4% to €7.15 billion

Commenting on the performance Snaitech CEO Fabio Schiavolin said, "The group has finalised the merger with Cogetech by achieving synergies, ahead of schedule, for approximately €20m and, more importantly, establishing a unique and invaluable wealth of resources, know-how and technologies, which led to a net profit of €27m.

"I would remark how such performance, along with the strong cash generation of €55m and the increase of EBITDA to €136m, was achieved in an unfavourable regulatory framework for concessioners, owing to taxation increase on gaming machines, introduced last April, and more generally to the absence of homogeneous rules on Gambling applied by local authorities."

"Snaitech's growth strategy in such a competitive arena is mainly focused on the following two drivers, well represented in 2017 annual reports.

"These are the growth of the online business, which recorded an increase of wagers by 30% owing to a valuable brand and a unique services portfolio in Italy; and the development of the proprietary platform Smart Technology to rejuvenate our betting distribution network, with a total capex plan of more than 20m for the two-year period 2017-18."