Total gaming revenue in Sweden was up 5.8% to SEK6.54bn in the first quarter of 2022, as growth in land-based casinos and online gaming offset a decline in lottery sales.
Despite being a year-on-year increase, revenue was down 6.8% from the previous quarter.
Online betting and gaming made up most of this total, with revenue growing 7.2% to SEK4.20bn. This was also up 0.3% quarter-on-quarter.
The state lottery – run by Svenska Spel – as well as Svenska Spel’s Vegas brand of slot halls – brought in a combined SEK1.29bn, down 4.4% from Q1 of 2021 and down 23.6% from Q4.
Svenska Spel’s Casino Cosmopol brand of land-based casinos, meanwhile, brought in SEK103m, after no such revenue in Q1 of 2021, when these casinos were closed because of Covid-19. Compared to Q4, revenue was down 28.5%
Charitable lotteries brought in SEK863m, which was very slightly up from the same period of 2021, but down 3.0% from Q4.
Restaurant casinos brought in SEK39m, up from just SEK5m in Q1, but down from SEK62m in Q4.
Regulator Spellinspektionen also revealed that at the end of the first quarter, slightly more than 73,000 people had self-excluded from gambling using the Spelpaus self-exclusion tool. Meanwhile, 91 companies had active licenses for the Swedish market, excluding charitable gaming licensees.
Today, Sweden’s government also published a new bill to amend the country’s gaming laws by introducing licences for B2B software providers and implementing a new standard of “adjusted moderation” for marketing, as had previously been proposed in January.
Branschföreningen för Onlinespel (BOS) said it was “cautiously positive” after publication of the bill, particularly as the government had opted not to limit the hours in which gambling operators can market. However, the body also said it needed more clarity about what the new rules for marketing mean in practice.
