MultiChoice’s Diversification Gamble: The Future of Entertainment & Betting?

Right at the beginning of the year, MultiChoice Group announced the launch of SuperSport Bet - a partnership between MultiChoice and KingMakers to launch a sport and casino betting platform in South Africa. To most it seemed random - perhaps an opportunity to hop on and capitalise on the betting industry’s current momentum. 

The keen-eyed among you will know that this has been sometime in the making actually. About half a decade if we’re being exact. Over that course of time - MultiChoice has been informing their shareholders about their plans around betting and we’re going to go through years of communications to establish a clearer picture of what’s going on. Our intent is to establish why the group is moving into the lucrative but controversial betting aka gaming industry and how they are going about doing it.

The first time MultiChoice spoke to their investors regarding their betting intentions was in their *2021 half-year interim results when they announced a 20% investment in KingMakers (known as BetKing at the time). The investment would go into effect from October 2020 and an initial investment of US$81mn would be put into KingMakers.

*MultiChoice's financial year runs from April to March in the following year and their half-year ends on 30 September