Reuters
LONDON - PartyGaming ,
the world's biggest online gaming group, said on Tuesday it signed up a
record number of poker players in the first quarter, helping it beat
forecasts with a 54 percent leap in sales.
The
company said its new blackjack game also boosted sales, which rose from
$342.6 million in the three months to end-March from $222.6 million
previously, prompting analysts to upgrade full-year forecasts.
PartyGaming also said its version of the board game backgammon would be
added soon, ahead of another product launch in a year which it expects
to see further "good progress."
Its shares zipped up more than 4 percent in early trade to peak at 158p
before drifting back to 150p by 0822 GMT, valuing the business at 6
billion pounds ($10.5 billion).
The staggering growth of the firm since it floated in June 2005 helped
one of its co-founders, Anurag Dikshit, rocket to number three in the
annual list of Britain's wealthiest Asians on Tuesday, with an
estimated fortune of 1.7 billion pounds.
Dikshit is behind the software which allows PartyGaming gamblers to make their bets online.
PartyGaming signed up 263,254 new poker players during the quarter, 23
percent more than the same three months a year earlier, some 39 percent
of those coming from outside the United States, where it has been
trying to reduce its dependence.
House broker Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein said it was upgrading its
earnings forecasts by 6.2 percent for 2006 and by 5.6 percent for 2007.
Analyst Charles Wilson at Bridgewell also said he was likely to upgrade
his forecast after a "very positive" set of numbers.
PartyGaming finance chief Martin Weigold told reporters it expected an
eventual 50:50 split between U.S. and other sales but that this move
would be gradual.
U.S. STILL A WORRY
More than 78 percent of the company's first-quarter revenue came from
the United States, where bills recently introduced into Congress
propose a ban on Web-based gambling and the use of credit cards to pay
online wagers.
Online gambling stocks have enjoyed a strong run since then as doubts
were raised about the likelihood the new U.S. rules would go through,
though the worry has not gone away.
"While we are confident the current bills are unlikely to be passed,
that does not mean the operators are out of the woods yet," Morgan
Stanley analyst Jamie Rollo said in a note.
PartyGaming said the launch of blackjack last year had boosted growth,
with net sales from the game averaging $700,000 per day.
It said the introduction of PartyCasino.com earlier this year had also
exceeded its expectations, lifting total net casino sales -- including
blackjack -- to more than $1 million per day.
The operator of the PartyPoker.com Web site, the world's largest poker
room, said the first-quarter yield per active player in poker rose 3
percent to $18.50 on fourth-quarter 2005.
PartyGaming's new chief executive, Mitchell Garber, a legal expert in
online gaming who also had helped build a major payment-processing
business, starts work on Wednesday.
