Being a gambler and going to the casino will make you always lose money on the longer term. And that’s why “The Bank always wins”. There isn’t a better business model, than generating endless cash at the expense of the addicted gamblers, right? You may be wrong. There is a company out there, which is providing B2B gambling solutions to online casinos. In short: The more gamblers are playing on their platform, the more share of revenue this company gets from those casinos – and the best thing: this company is not dependent on one country’s gambling authorities, because they serve so many different customers from different countries.
Evolution Gaming Group AB (publ) (”Evolution”) develops, produces, markets and licenses fully-integrated B2B Live Casino solutions to gaming operators. Since its inception in 2006, Evolution has developed into a leading B2B provider with 300+operators among its customers. The group currently employs about 6,800 people in studios across Europe and in North America.The parent company is based in Sweden and listed on Nasdaq Stockholm with the ticker EVO. Visit www.evolution.comfor more information.
Evolution is licensed and regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority under license MGA/B2B/187/2010. Evolution is also licensed and regulated in many other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, Romania, South Africa, and others.
Note: This video shows a live gameplay recorded on the evolution gaming platform.
Evolution Gaming’s fully digital B2B “all-inclusive” and quality platform offers the following:
Large selection of games – They offer a large selection of games like Blackjack, Roulette, Baccarat and so on. Have a look here: https://www.evolution.com/our-games
Product-Innovation– They publish completely new games at regular intervals or bring out variations and interesting variants of already established games. For example they invented “Dreamcatcher”, a big spinning gambling wheel and also enabled “1st-person gambling” on their platform.
Growth and expansion – the online casino market is one of the fastest growing markets of all. Evolution Gaming is currently strongly represented in Europe. Stronger growth is just beginning in the US. Other important gaming markets like Asia are hardly covered at the moment. Evolution Gaming has the opportunity to expand and grow for many years.
Margins and profitability – Thanks to its business model and the product as a platform, Evolution Gaming has been able to continuously increase both margins and profits in recent years. Precise cost control over fixed costs and an improved, revenue-oriented and increasing range of new products continuously increase margins and thus profitability.
Pandemic-proof – The earnings and business development of the last quarters has clearly shown, that the business is safe from the pandemic. The pandemic has even accelerated growth as more people are interested in online casinos during social distancing.
Market dominance – Evolution Gaming is by far the market leader in its field, both in terms of numbers as well as product offering and quality. The next largest competitor in this business segment is NetEnt, which is currently being taken over by Evolution Gaming. More information about this important and interesting acquisition later. As the absolute market leader, Evolution Gaming also has a strong position in terms of pricing and contractual conditions.
Geo-diversified – Another advantage is the geographical diversification and the focus on different countries. Since we are operating in a market that is fundamentally very strongly regulated, which is permanently restricted, controlled and legalized by governments and regulations, a broad customer base is essential. So regulations of individual markets do not matter much to Evolution Gaming, compared to the casinos directly affected.
Evolution Gaming has once again presented very strong growth figures. Particularly striking, in addition to high revenue growth, is the development of EBITDA and profit.
Evolution Gaming regularly enters partnerships with online casinos. For these online casinos, separate tables and casino rooms are then set up in the respective corporate design of the company to enhance the gamblers’ customer experience.
Evolution Gaming has recently signed two more such contracts for the US market, demonstrating the company’s ambition to grow strongly in the US market.
Evolution Gaming announced in October to change the company branding to just “Evolution”. This is to better reflect the digital spirit of the company as well as its innovative power. It also removes the limitation of focusing solely on the gaming market and allows for a view into other market segments in the digital video / studio content / digital entertainment sector.
On the 24th of June 2020, Evolution Gaming announced a public take over of all outstanding shares of NetEnt. NetEnt is a direct competitor in the live casino market. NetEnt is also famous for their very interactive slot machines for online casinos.
This acquistion is important and will be discussed later in a separate section of this research.
Note: All numbers are in SEK | On 5th May 2019 there was 5/1 stock split – Reason for the harsh EPS drop in Q2 2019.
The company pays an annual dividend of minimum 50% of the net profit.
The last dividend was paid on 17th June 2020 and amounted to SEK 4.43 for the fiscal year 2019, representing an annual yield of 0.62%.
This is in fact not a high dividend, but a normal amount for such a high growth stock.
The share structure of this company is pretty normal: There are many relevant institutional owners and not many big private investors.
Source: https://www.evolution.com/share/shareholder-structure
Note: For additional information about the share structure, please go to the Financials section and look it up there.
They describe their business model as the following:
Evolution develops, produces, markets and licenses fully integrated Live Casino solutions to gaming operators. The gaming operators then market the products to their end users. Evolution’s customers include a majority of the most prominent online gaming operators worldwide, as well as several land-based casinos that have expanded online.
Source: https://www.evolution.com/investment-case/business-model
To give you a more basic understanding of the business model of Evolution Gaming, we explain it here and now in more detail with an example:
Imagine you are the operator of a new online casino. You realize that all your competitors offer a high-quality live casino suite, all of which are identical. Both the offered games, as well as the graphical user interface of the live casino area all look the same. You notice that the offer comes from Evolution Gaming. Since you as an online casino do not have the capacity and know-how to build a similarly good live casino platform, you simply decide to also introduce the live casino environment of Evolution Gaming. This step saves you a lot of money and reduces your personal staff heavily.
In return, Evolution Gaming charges a fixed percentage of the revenue that my guests generate at the Evolution Gaming live casino tables. For Evolution Gaming it is completely irrelevant whether we or the player wins – the money that is turned over is counted as turned over money and Evolution Gaming will charge their fee on that amount.
Source: https://www.evolution.com/investment-case/business-model
In order to set yourself as a casino apart from the competition and provide your players with the most authentic gaming experience possible, Evolution Gaming also offers their own tables or even areas of the live studios in the corporate design of your casino.
As an added extra, Evolution Gaming even offers live gaming tables with different languages to serve each market with its own language.
Note: A “Leovegas” Live-Casino Table from Evolution Gaming.
Source: https://www.livedealers.com/games/leo-vegas-blackjack/
Evolution Gaming currently operates in several countries and has live studios in:
Riga, Latvia
Fort Mriehel, Malta
Tbilisi, Georgia
Bucharest, Romania
Vancouver, Canada
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Spa, Belgium
Murcia, Spain
They also have so called “land-based” Studios in exisiting and real casinos.
All of their live experience can be consumed on desktop computers, mobile devices and tv.
More information on https://www.evolution.com/what-we-do
The Evolution Gaming Management has a solid trackrecord with relevant business knowledge. Almost every member of the Management owns a solid amount of shares of the company.
As we learned, Evolution Gaming offers a live-casino platform for online casinos. Once the customer of the online casino enters the platform, he can enter almost every table and play different games. How this can look like describes the following video it’s best:
Evolution Gaming doesn’t market itself directly to consumers, most of their marketing and corporate branding is for B2B. A real important fact is, that Evolution Gaming has more the image of a international tech company, than the image of a shady gambling provider.
The competition in the market, in which Evolution Gaming is active, is very manageable. In principle, there is only one big competitor, especially for the European market. The remaining competitors are not noticeable or are currently not in a position where they could become dangerous for Evolution Gaming.
Here is short list with competitors and additional information:
Very exciting is that Evolution Gaming wants to take over exactly this competitor completely. As already announced above, Evolution Gaming made a takeover offer to all shareholders of NetEnt on June 24, 2020.
Evolution Gaming sees the following advantages and strategic opportunities in the deal:
This is a landmark deal which will accelerate Evolution’s move towards becoming the world leader in the online gaming industry.
The merger of Evolution’s leading position in Live Casino with NetEnt’s strong position in online slots will create a best-in-class B2B provider with capacity to drive the digitalization of the global gaming industry (90 per cent of the global casino industry is still land-based).
The US market has a potential to become Evolution’s largest market over time as individual states regulate. The merger of Evolution’s existing Live Casino offering through the existing New Jersey studio as well as the planned studios in Pennsylvania and Michigan with NetEnt’s strong US presence in online slots will accelerate this development and fast-track the combined company’s move into the US online gaming market.
The combined product portfolio will include some of the world’s most popular Live Casino and online slots games and generate revenue upsides through cross-selling and improved distribution via both companies’ customer bases, with closer customer partnerships and additional geographical spread of the companies’ products as result. The range of the combined offer will provide significant upsides to customers and player experience as well as enable new collaborations between world-class development resources.
The combination is expected to result in annual cost savings of approximately EUR 30 million, compared to the combined cost basis of NetEnt and Evolution as of the first quarter of 2020. This includes the cost savings of approximately SEK 150 million which NetEnt has already disclosed.
The combined company will become a leading online gaming provider with a strong platform for international growth and expansion, both organic and through additional acquisitions.
Source: https://www.b2bonlinecasino.com/ app/uploads/2020/06/ Evolution-Gaming-announces-a-recommended-public-offer-to- the-shareholders-of-NetEnt-.pdf
If Evolution Gaming can complete the planned acquisition of NetEnt, it will catapult the company even further forward. With the help of NetEnt, Evolution Gaming would have an extra foot in the door to the US market. Furthermore, Evolution Gaming would expand its product portfolio with premium slot machines and thus become the absolute market leader for solutions for online casinos. This would strengthen its pricing power and further dig out the already strong castle moat.
Evolution Gaming is in one of the fastest growing markets on the move. More and more online casinos are being founded and need a reliable partner for their live casino solution. Furthermore, there are still many untapped or very few present markets, which provide the opportunity to grow several years.
They can spread and grow in markets that have already been developed, but also in markets that are still underdeveloped. Moreover, the change from a real casino to an online casino is only just taking place in many important gaming markets. The Covid-19 pandemic will of course accelerate this trend even more and lend it further momentum.
The author of this article has long believed that evolution gaming is no longer limited to the live casino market. He believes that Evolution Gaming is using the experience and technical capabilities of its studios to develop other entertainment segments such as live shows and games. This assumption is supported by live gaming formats such as “Deal or No-Deal” from Evolution Gaming. In addition, the acquisition of NetEnt or the rebranding are also steps in the same direction.
So it could well be that products and “originals” of Evolution Gaming will soon be available to a wider range of viewers and not only to casino players.
Evolution Gaming is an endless success story. With the potential of many more years of growth, a transfer from land-based casinos to online casinos and untapped markets, as well as the very exciting acquisition of NetEnt, the stock is a clear buy and one of the most exciting growth stocks around.
Since the share already has a high valuation in principle, we are not setting a target share price here. Nevertheless, the share should still have a lot of potential for the future, for the reasons mentioned above.
Our recommendation: This stock is a clear buy. Use sell-offs or weak market days for buying in or averaging up.
Due to the medium marketcap and the float (the amount of shares circling around and traded, which are not held by major investors) of EVO shares, there are certain risks and an medium volatility.
The author currently holds a position in the mentioned stock and may sell his entire holding shortly after the release of this article. The mentioned company does NOT compensate the author or the publisher of this website.
This post is not an investment advice and should not be treated as one. Please contact your local bank or broker for financial advice.
Being a gambler and going to the casino will make you always lose money on the longer term. And that's why "The Bank always wins". There isn't a better business model, than generating endless cash at the expense of the addicted gamblers, right? You may be wrong. There is a company out there, which is providing B2B gambling solutions to online casinos. In short: The more gamblers are playing on their platform, the more share of revenue this company gets from those casinos - and the best thing: this company is not dependent on one country's gambling authorities, because they serve so many different customers from different countries.
Evolution Gaming Group AB (publ) (”Evolution”) develops, produces, markets and licenses fully-integrated B2B Live Casino solutions to gaming operators. Since its inception in 2006, Evolution has developed into a leading B2B provider with 300+operators among its customers. The group currently employs about 6,800 people in studios across Europe and in North America.The parent company is based in Sweden and listed on Nasdaq Stockholm with the ticker EVO. Visit www.evolution.comfor more information.
Evolution is licensed and regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority under license MGA/B2B/187/2010. Evolution is also licensed and regulated in many other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, Romania, South Africa, and others.
Note: This video shows a live gameplay recorded on the evolution gaming platform.
Evolution Gaming's fully digital B2B "all-inclusive" and quality platform offers the following:
Large selection of games – They offer a large selection of games like Blackjack, Roulette, Baccarat and so on. Have a look here: https://www.evolution.com/our-games
Product-Innovation- They publish completely new games at regular intervals or bring out variations and interesting variants of already established games. For example they invented "Dreamcatcher", a big spinning gambling wheel and also enabled "1st-person gambling" on their platform.
Growth and expansion – the online casino market is one of the fastest growing markets of all. Evolution Gaming is currently strongly represented in Europe. Stronger growth is just beginning in the US. Other important gaming markets like Asia are hardly covered at the moment. Evolution Gaming has the opportunity to expand and grow for many years.
Margins and profitability – Thanks to its business model and the product as a platform, Evolution Gaming has been able to continuously increase both margins and profits in recent years. Precise cost control over fixed costs and an improved, revenue-oriented and increasing range of new products continuously increase margins and thus profitability.
Pandemic-proof – The earnings and business development of the last quarters has clearly shown, that the business is safe from the pandemic. The pandemic has even accelerated growth as more people are interested in online casinos during social distancing.
Market dominance – Evolution Gaming is by far the market leader in its field, both in terms of numbers as well as product offering and quality. The next largest competitor in this business segment is NetEnt, which is currently being taken over by Evolution Gaming. More information about this important and interesting acquisition later. As the absolute market leader, Evolution Gaming also has a strong position in terms of pricing and contractual conditions.
Geo-diversified – Another advantage is the geographical diversification and the focus on different countries. Since we are operating in a market that is fundamentally very strongly regulated, which is permanently restricted, controlled and legalized by governments and regulations, a broad customer base is essential. So regulations of individual markets do not matter much to Evolution Gaming, compared to the casinos directly affected.
Evolution Gaming has once again presented very strong growth figures. Particularly striking, in addition to high revenue growth, is the development of EBITDA and profit.
Evolution Gaming regularly enters partnerships with online casinos. For these online casinos, separate tables and casino rooms are then set up in the respective corporate design of the company to enhance the gamblers' customer experience.
Evolution Gaming has recently signed two more such contracts for the US market, demonstrating the company's ambition to grow strongly in the US market.
Evolution Gaming announced in October to change the company branding to just "Evolution". This is to better reflect the digital spirit of the company as well as its innovative power. It also removes the limitation of focusing solely on the gaming market and allows for a view into other market segments in the digital video / studio content / digital entertainment sector.
On the 24th of June 2020, Evolution Gaming announced a public take over of all outstanding shares of NetEnt. NetEnt is a direct competitor in the live casino market. NetEnt is also famous for their very interactive slot machines for online casinos.
This acquistion is important and will be discussed later in a separate section of this research.
Note: All numbers are in SEK | On 5th May 2019 there was 5/1 stock split - Reason for the harsh EPS drop in Q2 2019.
The company pays an annual dividend of minimum 50% of the net profit.
The last dividend was paid on 17th June 2020 and amounted to SEK 4.43 for the fiscal year 2019, representing an annual yield of 0.62%.
This is in fact not a high dividend, but a normal amount for such a high growth stock.
The share structure of this company is pretty normal: There are many relevant institutional owners and not many big private investors.
Source: https://www.evolution.com/share/shareholder-structure
Note: For additional information about the share structure, please go to the Financials section and look it up there.
They describe their business model as the following:
Evolution develops, produces, markets and licenses fully integrated Live Casino solutions to gaming operators. The gaming operators then market the products to their end users. Evolution’s customers include a majority of the most prominent online gaming operators worldwide, as well as several land-based casinos that have expanded online.
Source: https://www.evolution.com/investment-case/business-model
To give you a more basic understanding of the business model of Evolution Gaming, we explain it here and now in more detail with an example:
Imagine you are the operator of a new online casino. You realize that all your competitors offer a high-quality live casino suite, all of which are identical. Both the offered games, as well as the graphical user interface of the live casino area all look the same. You notice that the offer comes from Evolution Gaming. Since you as an online casino do not have the capacity and know-how to build a similarly good live casino platform, you simply decide to also introduce the live casino environment of Evolution Gaming. This step saves you a lot of money and reduces your personal staff heavily.
In return, Evolution Gaming charges a fixed percentage of the revenue that my guests generate at the Evolution Gaming live casino tables. For Evolution Gaming it is completely irrelevant whether we or the player wins - the money that is turned over is counted as turned over money and Evolution Gaming will charge their fee on that amount.
Source: https://www.evolution.com/investment-case/business-model
In order to set yourself as a casino apart from the competition and provide your players with the most authentic gaming experience possible, Evolution Gaming also offers their own tables or even areas of the live studios in the corporate design of your casino.
As an added extra, Evolution Gaming even offers live gaming tables with different languages to serve each market with its own language.
Note: A "Leovegas" Live-Casino Table from Evolution Gaming.
Source: https://www.livedealers.com/games/leo-vegas-blackjack/
Evolution Gaming currently operates in several countries and has live studios in:
Riga, Latvia
Fort Mriehel, Malta
Tbilisi, Georgia
Bucharest, Romania
Vancouver, Canada
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Spa, Belgium
Murcia, Spain
They also have so called "land-based" Studios in exisiting and real casinos.
All of their live experience can be consumed on desktop computers, mobile devices and tv.
More information on https://www.evolution.com/what-we-do
The Evolution Gaming Management has a solid trackrecord with relevant business knowledge. Almost every member of the Management owns a solid amount of shares of the company.
As we learned, Evolution Gaming offers a live-casino platform for online casinos. Once the customer of the online casino enters the platform, he can enter almost every table and play different games. How this can look like describes the following video it's best:
Evolution Gaming doesn't market itself directly to consumers, most of their marketing and corporate branding is for B2B. A real important fact is, that Evolution Gaming has more the image of a international tech company, than the image of a shady gambling provider.
The competition in the market, in which Evolution Gaming is active, is very manageable. In principle, there is only one big competitor, especially for the European market. The remaining competitors are not noticeable or are currently not in a position where they could become dangerous for Evolution Gaming.
Here is short list with competitors and additional information:
Very exciting is that Evolution Gaming wants to take over exactly this competitor completely. As already announced above, Evolution Gaming made a takeover offer to all shareholders of NetEnt on June 24, 2020.
Evolution Gaming sees the following advantages and strategic opportunities in the deal:
This is a landmark deal which will accelerate Evolution’s move towards becoming the world leader in the online gaming industry.
The merger of Evolution’s leading position in Live Casino with NetEnt’s strong position in online slots will create a best-in-class B2B provider with capacity to drive the digitalization of the global gaming industry (90 per cent of the global casino industry is still land-based).
The US market has a potential to become Evolution’s largest market over time as individual states regulate. The merger of Evolution’s existing Live Casino offering through the existing New Jersey studio as well as the planned studios in Pennsylvania and Michigan with NetEnt’s strong US presence in online slots will accelerate this development and fast-track the combined company’s move into the US online gaming market.
The combined product portfolio will include some of the world’s most popular Live Casino and online slots games and generate revenue upsides through cross-selling and improved distribution via both companies’ customer bases, with closer customer partnerships and additional geographical spread of the companies’ products as result. The range of the combined offer will provide significant upsides to customers and player experience as well as enable new collaborations between world-class development resources.
The combination is expected to result in annual cost savings of approximately EUR 30 million, compared to the combined cost basis of NetEnt and Evolution as of the first quarter of 2020. This includes the cost savings of approximately SEK 150 million which NetEnt has already disclosed.
The combined company will become a leading online gaming provider with a strong platform for international growth and expansion, both organic and through additional acquisitions.
Source: https://www.b2bonlinecasino.com/ app/uploads/2020/06/ Evolution-Gaming-announces-a-recommended-public-offer-to- the-shareholders-of-NetEnt-.pdf
If Evolution Gaming can complete the planned acquisition of NetEnt, it will catapult the company even further forward. With the help of NetEnt, Evolution Gaming would have an extra foot in the door to the US market. Furthermore, Evolution Gaming would expand its product portfolio with premium slot machines and thus become the absolute market leader for solutions for online casinos. This would strengthen its pricing power and further dig out the already strong castle moat.
Evolution Gaming is in one of the fastest growing markets on the move. More and more online casinos are being founded and need a reliable partner for their live casino solution. Furthermore, there are still many untapped or very few present markets, which provide the opportunity to grow several years.
They can spread and grow in markets that have already been developed, but also in markets that are still underdeveloped. Moreover, the change from a real casino to an online casino is only just taking place in many important gaming markets. The Covid-19 pandemic will of course accelerate this trend even more and lend it further momentum.
The author of this article has long believed that evolution gaming is no longer limited to the live casino market. He believes that Evolution Gaming is using the experience and technical capabilities of its studios to develop other entertainment segments such as live shows and games. This assumption is supported by live gaming formats such as "Deal or No-Deal" from Evolution Gaming. In addition, the acquisition of NetEnt or the rebranding are also steps in the same direction.
So it could well be that products and "originals" of Evolution Gaming will soon be available to a wider range of viewers and not only to casino players.
Evolution Gaming is an endless success story. With the potential of many more years of growth, a transfer from land-based casinos to online casinos and untapped markets, as well as the very exciting acquisition of NetEnt, the stock is a clear buy and one of the most exciting growth stocks around.
Since the share already has a high valuation in principle, we are not setting a target share price here. Nevertheless, the share should still have a lot of potential for the future, for the reasons mentioned above.
Our recommendation: This stock is a clear buy. Use sell-offs or weak market days for buying in or averaging up.
Due to the medium marketcap and the float (the amount of shares circling around and traded, which are not held by major investors) of EVO shares, there are certain risks and an medium volatility.
The author currently holds a position in the mentioned stock and may sell his entire holding shortly after the release of this article. The mentioned company does NOT compensate the author or the publisher of this website.
This post is not an investment advice and should not be treated as one. Please contact your local bank or broker for financial advice.