Caesars Reports Strong Q2 With Focus on iGaming Growth
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00:00It is earnings season, and for you folks over at Legal Sports Report, that means we get the very latest going on with all of the sports betting operators.
00:07Let's start off with Caesars. What did their numbers look like?
00:11Yeah, it's really interesting for reporters like us to kind of get a good look under the hood of what these sports betting companies are doing.
00:18And Caesars is one of the first to report they had a really, really strong second quarter, especially when you're talking about the entire business,
00:26but also specifically online sports betting and iGaming.
00:30They had $45 million in adjusted earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, depreciation, sorry, and amortization.
00:39It's kind of a tongue twister. It's very jargony, but that's basically what we look at when you're talking about making profit in the industry.
00:47That's been a big theme over the last couple of years. One of these companies is going to start making profit.
00:51Caesars wants to make a $500 million profit sort of by the end of next year.
00:56So the fact that they were able to do $45 million just in the first half of this year is pretty impressive when you look at what they did last year,
01:03when they only had $7 million in EBITDA at that time.
01:06So the way that they've done it is essentially growing their iGaming app.
01:11Sports betting really hasn't been as big of a priority for them as much in terms of growing handle and growing users.
01:18They've really focused on using the Caesars product.
01:21They launched the App Palace last year, which they said is really fueling growth there.
01:27They had, I think, handle and iGaming is up 39% this year, which is obviously huge when you talk about a business with better margins for a company like that.
01:37Sports betting is also improving, but not as much at the same rate.
01:41They had a 7.2% hold compared to 6.4% last year.
01:45So it's getting better, which they're talking about, you know, the product is improving, which, you know, when it comes to the product, it's how can you get people to bet more parlays?
01:52How can you have the most attractive seeing game parlay offering that people are going to basically bet more on these bets that don't turn out as well for them typically as kind of straight bets on different sides of games and totals and things like that.
02:05So they're kind of catching up in that department, but sports betting is definitely still not as much of a priority as iGaming.
02:11So it'll be really interesting to see going forward, you know, whether they pivot when they kind of get happy with iGaming and OK, maybe this is the time you can utilize the sports betting product more.
02:21But so far, kind of the plan that they've had of doing iGaming first and getting that right seems to be working out for their bottom line.