Online Casino’s biggest payout, the reclaiming of a top spot, the company’s biggest launch ever and an $85m acquisition. These are just a few things to describe Evolution‘s second-quarter activities. Yet why did the firm’s CEO, Martin Carlesund, describe their Q2 performance as just solid?

SBC’s Multimedia Editor, James Ross, and CasinoBeats’s Senior Journalist, Danny Lee, will be delving into Evolution’s Q2 figures and the subsequent reaction on the latest episode of iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove.

On the results, Danny said: “They performed fairly well across the quarter. The CEO referred to the results as solid which you could say they are. Operating revenues were up 15% compared to the same quarter last year coming in at €508.4m and EBITDA also climbed across the quarter as well, rising by 10.9% to €354m.”

Evolution’s Q2 growth may have been stunted by a record payout on its Crazy Time game, which led to Carlesund saying that the reported results were not fully reflective of the company’s operational performance. 

“There are some clear reasons, one reason being that we had the largest payout ever in an online casino during the quarter of our Crazy Time game. Large player wins are part of the game and positive for our games’ attractiveness to players, but it does affect us through lower revenue share in the period,” he explained, at the time of the announcement. 

Overall, Evolution paid out €35m to over 5,000 players which Carlesund heralded as the largest payout in online casino history, however, the pair questioned the claim saying “you wouldn’t call it an accurate claim but it’s probably a solid claim”.

The firm’s expansion of its live casino sector has continued with the launch of Lightning Storm via BetMGM in Ontario. Carlesund described the game as Evolution’s “biggest launch ever” adding that “nothing but perfection is enough” for it.

“They’ve touted it as its biggest launch ever and actually Carlesund referred to it as one of the biggest releases ever in the industry,” explained Danny. 

“They’re putting a lot of pressure on this game to perform well. It’s another live casino game show that uses a money wheel format and is similar to Crazy Time, which is seeing all these big payouts come out. It will be quite interesting to see how well it performs with the quotes that they’re putting behind this game [and] it’s going to be an interesting one to look at in the next quarter.”

Another strand of Evolution’s growth strategy is M&A and the firm recently agreed to an $85m acquisition of Galaxy Gaming which Danny describes as a “great move”.

He added: “Galaxy Gaming are a very established provider of table games in the industry. They’re licensed in 28 states across the US as well as being sort of licensed for over 130 different regions worldwide. They’ve got a huge portfolio of table games that Evolution can make use of.

The reported figure of €85m is significantly less than other similar deals and James says it is a “great deal” for Evolution considering they are “getting a lot for their money”.