From The Conversation – That bookmaker Tom Waterhouse has sold his eponymous company to British bookmaking powerhouse William Hill is no surprise. Waterhouse’s recent very public bid for recognition and market share was widely viewed as a strategy to make his company a bright prospect amidst the plethora of online bookies licensed to operate in Australia.
That his high-profile self-promotion exercise also infuriated sports fans watching their favourite code on TV was collateral damage. His competitors accused him of queering their (marketing) pitch by his ubiquitous, high-profile (and expensive) TV promotion of live odds. Public outcry forced reluctant politicians to engineer a new agreement with broadcasters to limit this aspect of gambling advertising.
Of course, what has been agreed stops well short of a ban on the promotion of gambling via sport – ads for bookies and sponsorship by them of sporting teams is, with the possible exception of South Australia, unimpeded.
William Hill is now a global brand, and Britain’s largest bookmaker. It recently acquired Sportingbet Australia (which also owns Centrebet) for A$660 million, and the addition of Tom Waterhouse’s operation (which has a 5% market share) gives it a 25% share in the Australian market. This puts it ahead of its Irish competitor Paddy Power, whose full acquisition of Sportsbet in 2010 gave it market share of around 20%.
Of course, bookies are only one segment of Australia’s gambling sector, which takes net revenues of around $20 billion per year. Racing and sportsbetting combined took around $3 billion in 2009-10 (the latest year for which Australia wide data are available), of which about $300 million was sports betting. Most of that ($2.4 billion) went to TABs, attacked by William Hill as monopolists with a monopoly perspective and monopoly management style. But racing revenues have been in decline for years, and few would expect to see any recovery in years to come.
