Trends
Gambling is an important sector of the leisure market in terms of employment and its broader economic contribution, both in Great Britain and across the world.
Operating in highly regulated markets, our focus is on providing a distinctive gambling experience that entertains and ensures that we deliver value to all our stakeholders.
In the UK and Spain our brands enjoy leading market positions. Our scale allows us to withstand variations in consumer behaviours and macro-economic changes, and to take advantage of the impacts that these changes have on competitors in the wider industry. The strength of our brands, in both the UK and Spain, is a key competitive advantage and we are confident that we have considerable opportunity to deliver continued strong growth. We will, therefore, only consider entering other geographies where we identify perceived competitive strength and opportunity.
In the coming year, we expect to enter Portugal with YoBingo, which will be the first bingo brand in the Portuguese market.
Gambling is very tightly regulated with the regulations established by legislation. In order to meet the expectations of today’s consumers, we seek to ensure that the sectors in which we operate are well understood by parliamentarians, ministers, officials, and our regulator.
In the UK, the passage of the Government’s Gambling Act Review has resulted in very significant changes in legislation and regulation and we will see further changes over the coming year as Government policy is further reviewed, subject to public consultations and, where appropriate, implemented.
Our approach is to seek a correct balance between ensuring important customer protections are in place alongside regulation that enables our businesses to meet the demands of our customers which will, in turn, enable Rank to grow responsibly.Our customers rightly expect us to provide exciting and entertaining experiences when they choose to play with us, and the way in which we deliver these experiences must evolve to account for changing behaviours. Our venues help us to showcase our values, with exceptional customer service a pre-requisite across all our teams. In our venues and online, our data teams look to provide high-quality insight into trends and expectations as we look to anticipate customer change and positively respond to it in an agile and authentic way.
We are a large-scale operator in both the UK and Spain and that enables us to identify mitigations in inflationary environments. Employment costs remain the most significant operating cost, and changes announced in the Autumn 2024 UK Budget have impacted profitability.
However, we continually seek to deploy our key resources across the Group to maximise efficiencies and address the economic pressures that exist within our supply chains.