PartyGaming released very strong results for the 4th quarter, with revenues up 65 percent to $320 million. The company also signed up 229,227 new poker players during the same period, a new record. The revenue growth is largely attributed to effective cross-selling of Blackjack to PartyPoker's existing customer base.
PartyPoker added Blackjack to it's poker room in October last year. An impressive 44 percent of PartyPoker's poker players now also play Blackjack. According to PartyGaming's CEO, Richard Segal, Partygaming is "well on [it's] way to creating the world's largest online casino." PartyGaming plans to add two more casino games this year, as well as to implement a "shared purse" concept, where players can play all games from the same account.
Another factor boosting PartyGaming's revenues was an 8 percent increase in player yield per day compared with the 3rd quarter.
PartyPoker signed up a record number of 229,000 new players in the 4th quarter. Almost one third of the new signups came from outside the U.S., particularly Europe. One of the company's key objectives it to reduce it's dependency on the U.S. market, because of the less favorable legal climate towards online gambling in that country when compared to most other countries.
PartyGaming is listed on the London Stock Exchange since June last year. Shortly after the flotation the company's CEO said he expected a slow down in the growth of online poker. Over the months that followed this proved to be wrong, even to the point that financial analysts were expecting very strong results for the 4th quarter. Since the actual results presented by PartyGaming were even better than expected, almost all analyst have now upgraded their 2006 forecasts for the company.