Virtual Sports and other trends in Africa

Haven’t you thought about Africa as a betting market target?

Well, you should.

The continent’s gambling industry has been experiencing a huge development during the last few years. In fact, in 2018, all the industry eyes were put on Africa, as Johannesburg was the location for the first ICE Totally Gaming conference, which included representatives from almost 30 African nations.

Now ICE Africa takes place every year with great success!

The African market is expanding fast, especially in Virtual Football and other Virtual Sports. It is a new sphere for operators and providers with the potential of becoming one of the largest online gambling markets in the world.

Virtual Sports

The Virtual Sports market in Africa is very important and still has a huge potential of growth. In fact, the amount of traffic in virtual sports in the African market is already the same as in real sports.

Virtual sports players in Africa are mostly males, between 18 and 40 years old and, of course, they are crazy about football. They like to bet on real football, especially international leagues and tournaments such as the English Premier or the Spanish Liga, the Euro Champions and the World Cup.

GoldenRace is the leader in Virtual Football League bets per day in Africa. Our leagues and cups are as close to reality as possible, with the advantage of being able to play every five minutes, or even instantly, instead of having to wait a week or more.

Other African audiences prefer number games like Keno or Spin2Win and in some French-speaking areas horse races are very popular.

Other betting trends

Apart from virtual sports and its king, virtual football, we can see other important betting trends in the African market, such as the big market share of land-based betting shops and the huge opportunity for online thanks to a surprising mobile penetration.

Mainly retail

Despite new online casinos popping up regularly and some mobile success markets such as Kenya, the African betting industry is mainly land-based, as most of the territory still has a low Internet connection.

GoldenRace has the most cost-effective and flexible retail solution in the virtual sports industry, which helped us to reach a market share of 80% all over Africa.

As every market is different, we work for its specific requests, tailoring solutions for our customers and working closely to help them deliver exactly what they need, always putting the players first.

To know how people think locally, we approach the business and stay close to our clients, frequently visiting their shops.

Mobile use

While the Internet penetration in Africa is still below the world’s average (39,3% in Africa and 58,7% the world average¹), the continent encompasses an incredible 32% of the world's smartphone contracts.

Thankfully, our live rendering system works perfectly for countries with a low Internet connection. And our online solution has been specifically designed for mobile (and desktop) featuring the most important football leagues and other virtual games every few minutes and on demand, making it extremely attractive for the local population.

Also, the constant evolution of the continent, its economic growth, the appearance of new payment methods and the spread of the internet and smartphones have made Africa one of the fastest-growing mobile markets in the world.

An each-time-better connectivity together with the youngest population in the world help explain those trends.

There is still a lot of work to do, but Africa is clearly a truly promising market for online sports-betting operators, with mobile phones as the preferred platform for sports betting.

¹Source: https://www.internetworldstats.com