Portuguese Online Gambling Enjoy Q4 Surge

Portugal’s native regulator has eventually released the digital gambling sector’s final quarter data for 2021, which makes favourable reading for industry stakeholders. SRIJ has reported an impressive 24.7% uplift versus the previous year’s like-for-like performance.

Between October and December, Portuguese online operators generated a substantial €141.1m in revenue, an almost€30m increase on the final three months of 2020. Despite coronavirus restrictions still looming large throughout this comparative period, it’s unlikely that any limitations would have undermined online application usage. Indeed, if anything, the pandemic served to drive further traffic towards mobile betting solutions, and therefore these figures should generally be respected as signs of legitimate growth. Nevertheless, consumer confidence has clearly risen since the end of 2020, which should also be factored into any analysis.

Portugal’s iGaming revenue came in at€75.3m, a colossal 53.3% improvement on Q4 2020, whilst sportsbook applications delivered€65.8m, which represented a marginal 2.6% advantage on the previous twelve months. Total bets placed across all gambling streams fell just short of€2.5bn.

Within online casino gaming, slots emerged as by far the most popular vertical, contributing north of 78% of all wagers. French Roulette and Blackjack, although clearly well behind slots, were the second and third most played games respectively. In a sporting context, football unsurprisingly accounted for the bulk of betting activity, with 77.3% of all punts going on the nation’s favourite pastime.

The regulator also offered visibility on account registration and platform interaction. There were 212,600 new sign-ups across the sector in Q4, a 27.6% dip on Q4 2020. However, this is perhaps unsurprising given the aforementioned migration to mobile betting during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this figure is accompanied by 109,400 players opting to use available self-exclusion tools.