Throughout the Christmas season, Lottery Daily will be taking a snapshot of what some of the industry’s thought leaders have been saying about the lottery business during this year’s digital conferences run by SBC events.
During October’s SBC Digital Summit Africa event, Richard Tannous, Operations Manager and Director of World Sports Betting, took part in a discussion about how traditional lotteries are operating in Africa and how European operators are engaging with players on a panel titled ‘Lotteries in Africa’.
Tannous highlighted the importance of terminals across the continent, specifically stating how most of his firm’s lottery revenue in South Africa comes from retail.
He said: “From our side terminals are obviously very critical. I’d say that 80% of our lottery bets are probably coming from your brick and mortar stores.
“Obviously when we had the Coronavirus lockdown we saw our lotto holes drop significantly. The guys we sold to, they don’t have access to the smart devices, they still didn’t actually sign up to play online, they basically waited until we reopened again.
“I found that there’s a lot of informal business in South Africa with guys trading in cash and that’s the money that they used to come into the store and actually play. All that money that comes in-store, almost all of it is actual physical cash, the guys aren’t using cards and mobile phones for payments it’s still old fashioned in that sense.”
Also on the panel were Westernlottobet’s Managing Consultant, Johnson Adewale Foye, and Lottomania Nigeria’s CEO, Youssef Kaado.
Foye talked about his firm’s own problems integrating into the African lotto market with the lesson emphasising the importance of focusing on fixed-odds as opposed to jackpot products in the continent.
Foye stated: “We actually started in Westernlottobet with the jackpots and we were actually doing almost all the games from the European market. For over one year we were just going on the negative and we need to change and then move to the fixed odds.
“Then we tried to also run the agency model, which is land-based, and our revenue actually went from almost a very small figure to a very large figure, we went over 1,000% of the revenue that we were doing.”
Kaado added: “Basically for Nigeria, it’s totally fixed odds. My company tried to do different kinds of games. We would not hit a wall, but they are not performing very well at all. We even created fixed odd games, which is a 6/80 but with a big prize and a fixed ticket price.
“In Africa, as a whole, and Nigeria the 5/90 basically dominates the whole of the whole of the market in West Africa and you feel that the people don’t want to hear anything else.”
Click here to read more from the SBC Digital Summit Africa – ‘Lotteries in Africa’ panel.
