OPAP's Winning Ways
		Greece's gaming company is successfully changing the image of the betting business and has become the country's top stock

OPAP the Odds are on Success

OPAP  the gaming company which has become one of the country’s fastest growing and most profitable concerns, is in the process of revamping the image of the country’s betting business by making it more attractive to a wider public, particularly women.

It is changing the look and style of its 5,330 outlets across the country to give them a more sophisticated and customer-friendly appeal.

Tina Triantafyllou, one of the first women to operate as an OPAP agent, renovated her premises in coffee-shop style to make women feel more welcome.

“The women used to remain outside while their menfolk came in to place their bets,” she says. “Now women make up 30 percent of my clientele.”

Canadian Paralympic athlete Jeff Adams celebrates after Athens Acropolis climb.

Similar measures are being adopted at other OPAP operations up and down the country.

This re-branding exercise has helped to make OPAP Europe’s largest gaming and lottery company – and one of the continent’s 300 biggest blue-chip enterprises.

Founded in 1958, OPAP at first occupied itself with the relatively routine business of running Greece’s football pools. Five years ago however, it sought to expand its horizons in the field of the fixed-odds betting business, which was becoming more popular with the public.

At that time OPAP was fully state-owned, but the Greek government saw a good opportunity to benefit from the booming business and since 2000 has gradually floated 49 percent of the enterprise on the Athens stock market. OPAP never looked back.

 The share price began to rocket upward almost at once, and has remained blue-chip ever since. “It was one of the most successful IPOs in the history of the Greek stock market,” says OPAP Chief Executive Officer Sotirios Kostakos, who was appointed by the present Conservative government following its election last March.

By early this year OPAP had earned its way into the top five Greek concerns in terms of capitalization, becoming Europe’s second-best blue-chip performer in the process.

Legal gaming appears to have an assured future in Greece. OPAP in particular has
tapped into the Greeks’ passion for football and turned it into an impressive money-spinner. Projected 2004 adjusted net profit is estimated at €460 million, up some 30 percent
over 2003.

Not surprisingly, foreign institutional investors have been quick to spot the golden eggs in the OPAP goose, and have turned OPAP stock into one of their very few Greek favorites. In the first ten months of this year, OPAP topped all Greek stocks with a return of around 40 percent, lighting the way for other investors such as hedge funds to join the party. Foreign investors, says Kostakos, “have found stability.”

The year 2003 was seminal in the local growth of OPAP. As its share price jumped by 20 percent under the spur of aggressive management, the annual customer inflow surged past three million, as more than one million transactions flowed through its huge online gaming network each day.

This year has seen the introduction of Kino, a new game that has proved to be popular with football punters, and which has been rolled out over the entirety of the network in Greece and Cyprus. Kostakos, a former sports judge, takes the cautious approach despite the sunny horizon. “We have to be sure of every step we take, minimizing risk,” he says. 

If the history of Greek football pools is any indication, investors in OPAP have little, if anything, to fear. The Greek passion for athletics, stimulated by the recent Olympic Games, has already begun to rub off onto the gaming sector. Says Kostakos: “For at least the next 18 years, investors will have a steady profit.”

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Targeting the World

As a money-spinning company bearing a blue-chip stock market rating, OPAP is in an ideal position to expand abroad.

 The company enjoys a virtual and ensured monopoly of the sports forecasting market on its home turf, and aims to be operating more than 5,500 domestic outlets by next year. With this background OPAP is eyeing potential markets in Eastern Europe, plus a promising swath of territory stretching through the Central Asian republics to the frontiers of China. But OPAP isn’t jumping in with both feet just yet.

“Until the end of this year we’ll be studying very carefully all our files on international expansion proposals,” says the chief executive, Sotirios Kostakos. “We have to make new moves in the international market, though I cannot say when. It must go in tandem with our technological development.”

A touch of technological determinist philosophy creeps in here. From television to PCs, the history of technological innovation is littered with inventions that languished for years, even decades, until a mass market came to make them feasibly usable in large numbers. With technological development now at warp speed (as any computer user is aware), a company such as OPAP that deals in the strategic use of mathematical information must be sure not only of acquiring the requisite technology levels, but also that its clients have the technology available to use its services on a mass basis.

As Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia are lagging behind the West in their absorption of information technology, business decisions involving computer-based expansion must be careful indeed.

“Turkey is one area in which we could expand in a first stage,” explains Kostakos. “We want our knowledge to be really needed in the countries we are targeting.“

He says it is very important that OPAP looks at the innovation of games and improves the backup technology for the games.

The organization invests heavily in research, development and new technologies. It develops its business by introducing new games using advanced technological hardware and software.

Games of chance, games of skill and knowledge and fixed odds are all on offer at its premises. The new numerical games combine chance and fixed odds. OPAP says that people who like sport tend prefer football pools while others who like roulette and fast numbers like to play numbers games.

Kino, the newest game, is played for ten to fifteen minutes with draws ten to thirty
times a day.

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The Social Side Having been intimately bound up with Greek football for a couple of generations, OPAP has acquired a status that would be the envy of any organization.  Its logo has become firmly iconic, right up there in the Greek public pantheon along with the teams themselves, the flag, Sunday afternoons in front of the television and everything else that defines Greek life as it embarks on the 21st century. OPAP Chief Executive Officer Sotirios Kostakos knows this, and believes that deep public familiarity and acceptance were the driving force behind the successful IPO. “OPAP’s income is returned to Greek people,” he says. “In fact, anything that has to do with sports in Greece is usually built with our support.  All of OPAP’s games have a social aspect.” Greece team players line up on the pitch behind their trophy to celebrate after winning the Euro 2004 soccer final. With so much money involved in its operations, it is natural that sponsorships and charities play a large part in upholding the organization’s profile. In 2003 OPAP spent €25.5m on advertising and €17.5 million on sponsorships. The sponsorships were mainly of high-profile Greek state and commercial institutions such as the Thessaloniki International Trade Fair – an annual extravaganza that is held every September in the northern Greek port city – the Greek National Theatre, the National Basketball Association and hospital facilities around the country. OPAP provides a special treatment for Greece’s national football team, which this summer beat 80-to-1 odds to fight its way to victory in the European Championship. OPAP is the grand sponsor of the National Team until 2007. Over 250 charities and non-governmental organizations are recipients of OPAP’s largesse, especially institutions for the disabled and youth drug rehabilitation programs. Being conscious of its social responsibilities, OPAP commissioned a survey to check whether its games created psychological dependency among its players and found this was not the case. The reason, says OPAP is that the amounts being played are small. Compared with casinos, horse-racing and cards, it says, its players suffer almost no dependency. Back to top