Online gaming and financial trading systems giant Playtech PLC (LON:PTEC) has announced its results for the full year 2017, indicating a major slowdown in most key business units in the second half of the year.
Overall, Playtech revenues in 2H-2017 totaled €385.5 million, down 9% from the first half’s €421.6 million. And that, despite the company having made a number of acquisitions during the year.
The company’s key acquisition was its $150 million purchase of FX and multi-asset market maker ACM Group (Alpha), which when combined with Playtech’s end-of-2016 $120 million purchase of CFH Group, and the company’s existing Markets.com Retail FX brand, formed Playtech’s new financials unit, called TradeTech Group. Playtech completed the Alpha acquisition at the beginning of October, meaning that three months of its results were already included in the 2H-2017 totals.
However, Playtech’s financials group suffered an even greater Revenue decline than that the overall company, with financials Revenue down 12% in 2H-2017, €39.8 million versus €45.1 million in the first half of the year.
Interestingly, Playtech blamed a good part of the decline in its financial division on a $7.6 million loss from “crypto hype” (not why they put that in dollars, instead of euros) at Markets.com.
What happened to Playtech and Markets.com, we believe, occurred at a number of other Retail FX shops during Bitcoin and Ripple’s price run-up in the last few weeks of 2017 – virtually all the trading was one sided (i.e., going long), with the brokers not being able to hedge on the other side.
As far as outlook goes, the company did state that “TradeTech Group has made a strong start to the year”, without giving specifics.
Playtech’s full results report for 2017 can be seen here.