## Nordic Market Forecast: A €4 Billion Realm by 2023 – iGB
iGamingBusiness.com’s Nordic Market Overview, in collaboration with H2 Gambling Capital, forecasts that the region will reach a €44.6 billion market by 2023, driven by the new Swedish online gambling regulations.
This expansion will be fueled by regulation, with H2 predicting that the share of profits from authorized products will rise from 61.5% to 80.5% over the next five years. This is attributed to the expansion of regulated markets in Sweden and other nations.
Indeed, the growth from 2013 (one year following Danish regulation) to 2018, and the projection from 2018 to 2023, demonstrates that regulation is a key factor in online gambling growth.
This will occur despite countries like Norway and Finland maintaining their monopoly models. This has resulted in the emergence of successful offshore markets in these nations, but they are striving to suppress unauthorized activity.
In 2018, the Nordic online gambling market produced €34.9 billion in gross profits, a 10.1% increase from the previous year.
The Swedish online gambling market, which launched on January 1, 2019, has taken the lead in the past year, representing 34% of the region’s 2018 total income. Finland closely follows with 25%, and Denmark with 20%.
Data released by the Swedish gambling regulator Spelinspektionen shows that unauthorized operations in Sweden continued to expand in 2018. Finland’s Veikkaus also mentioned unregulated growth as a contributing factor to its decline that year. However, H2 notes that Nordic players tend to gamble through regulated platforms, with authorized websites accounting for 61.5% of total income, a 0.8 percentage point increase from 2017.
Examining the product mix over the past year, sports betting has been the most popular category by far. Betting represented 40% of total online gambling income in the Nordics in 2018, followed by casino at 28%. The market share of national lotteries is being diminished as players shift to other categories, accounting for 19% of total income.
However, the Nordic region seems to be trailing behind other regulated markets in terms of mobile adoption. In 2018, the channel accounted for 44.5% of online gambling total income, while mobile has become the preferred method of gambling in other regions. H2 anticipates mobile to continue to grow, becoming the dominant channel by 2020, with its income share increasing to 59.6% by 2023.
With the exception of Sweden, virtual gambling is significantly less favored in the Nordic area compared to physical gambling establishments. For instance, in Finland, virtual gambling earnings constituted 43.1% of the total market income in 2018, whereas in Iceland, it was 43.8%. The online gambling market share in Denmark (49.6%) and Norway (49.2%) is on the rise, but still trails behind Sweden, where digital gambling revenue represents 51.9% of total gambling revenue. Throughout the Nordic region, online gambling revenue constitutes 48.3% of total revenue, and is projected to expand to 56.5% by 2023.
H2 Gambling Capital is a prominent consulting, market intelligence and data team for the gambling sector. The firm boasts 18 years of experience in the global gambling industry, and its projections have had a substantial influence on the perspectives of global lawmakers and investors regarding the gambling industry.
Sign up for the iGaming newsletter.