Rest of The World Markets Infiltrate Global Online Rankings

South Africa and the Philippines will break into the world’s top ten regulated online gambling markets by the end of 2024, with five markets outside of Europe and the U.S. expected to feature in the global top 15 by 2025, according to Vixio’s new International Online Gambling Market Monitor.

According to market size data and estimates featured in Vixio’s new International Online Gambling Market Monitor, the fast-growing markets of South Africa and the Philippines settled in ninth and 11th place respectively in a global comparison of regulated online gambling markets by gross revenue in the first half of 2024 and will both feature in the top ten by the end of this year.

South Africa

Elevated by the transformational impact of the licensing of online live dealer, slot and crash games as "contingent" events for betting, South Africa has leapt from 20th place in 2021 to 14th in 2023 and is estimated to have broken into the top ten by the end of this year amid continued outsized growth in the booming licensing hubs of Western Cape and Mpumalanga. Taking this growth momentum into account, Vixio estimates that overall South African online gambling revenue will comfortably breach the US$2bn mark in 2024, having only surpassed US$1bn for the first time in 2023 as it grew by an estimated 63 percent to R25.9bn (US$1.47bn).

Philippines

South Africa is not the only emerging market expected to leapfrog the likes of Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and New York this year and break into the global top ten, with the red-hot domestic Philippines market projected to achieve the same from a lowly starting point of 26th in 2023.

Reported revenue from so-called electronic games, a segment dominated by live dealer table game variants filmed from casinos in the Entertainment City resort complex and Clark Freeport Zone, grew more than sixfold year-on-year to PHP30.9bn (US$552m) in Q2 2024 and PHP53.4bn (US$955m) in H1. The Philippines’ rapid emergence as a US$1bn+ domestic online gambling market has marked a departure from the norm in an Asia-Pacific region in which online gambling remains almost universally unregulated, illegal or under monopoly control.‍

Brazil

Vixio estimates indicate that Brazil, which is set to launch its new regulated online gambling system at the start of 2025, will become a multi-billion-dollar regulated online gambling market and likely break into the global top ten by 2026, while the US$1.3bn Mexican online market currently sits just outside of the global top 15 after a strong run of growth since 2020.

As a result, jurisdictions outside of Europe and the U.S. are expected to account for five of the top 15 and six of the top 20 regulated online gambling markets globally by 2025; in 2020, Australia represented the only so-called “rest of the world” market to feature in the top 20. 

What does this all mean?

The rise of markets such as South Africa, the Philippines, Ontario and, as of next year, Brazil has intensified an existing trend, largely fuelled over the past five years by the rapid spread of state-level regulated online gambling in the U.S., of emerging markets disrupting the previously European-centric market size rankings since 2019.

Europe, which remains the main epicentre of regulated online gambling globally and is projected to yield total online GGR of around €35bn in 2024, remains home to the top two markets globally in the UK and Italy, but is expected to host just three of the global top ten in 2024 compared to a dominant nine in 2018. 

At national level, the U.S. overtook the UK in online market size terms during 2022, emphatically delivering on its promise to become the largest regulated online gambling market in the world within four years of the repeal of PASPA.Four U.S. states, three of which are home to legal iGaming, as well as online sports-betting, figured among the world’s ten largest online markets in the first half of 2024, with the launch and subsequent growth of Ontario meaning that North America now occupies two more spaces in that top ten than Europe.

Nevertheless, a paucity of realistic major new market launches on the horizon means that Illinois, pending the successful passage of online casino legislation, and Florida, pending the extension of Hard Rock’s online betting monopoly into the iGaming arena, are considered the only U.S. state markets with realistic potential to break into the global top 15 in the medium term.

Vixio’s new International Online Gambling Market Monitor contains annual and quarterly online market size data across 67 locally licensed online gambling markets globally, offering users the opportunity to filter to online betting or gaming specifically and customise the currency in which market size data is reported. The latest addition to the Vixio Data Hub’s existing suite of Market Monitors, which will be continually updated as new data becomes available, also features interactive tabs allowing users to track the world’s top 25 regulated online gambling markets over a ten-year timeframe and visualise market size and growth trends across jurisdictions.

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