SportsBet, the biggest online bookmaker in Australia, has announced the signing of a new deal with OpenBet, which will provide the platform for the sportsbook for the following four years.
This new agreement will see SportsBet run its website on the OpenBet platform until the end of 2025, looking to continue the rapid growth it has experienced over the past year. SportsBet merged with BetEasy in 2020, creating the biggest online sportsbook in Australia.
In 2021 SportsBet overtook Tabcorp in the ranking of sports betting operators in the country, with revenue going up from 618 million United States dollars in 2019 to 1.46 billion dollars in 2020. Moreover, SportsBet generated revenues of 811 million dollars in the first half of 2021.
The rapid growth was not due to the merger with BetEasy alone. In fact, the combined market share of SportsBet and BetEasy at the time of the merger was 26 percent, but now it has grown to 47 percent while Tabcorp dropped from 50 percent to just 39.
SportsBet started out all the way back in 1994, with brick-and-mortar shops in Australia. Then went online in 1999 and was acquired by Paddy Power in 2009. In 2015, Paddy Power and Betfair merged and formed Flutter Entertainment plc, which is the company that continues to operate Sportsbet.