Matthew Tripp’s Betr set to win West Australian wagering licence

Matthew Tripp’s Betr is understood to have won over Entain Group, the owner of the Ladbrokes and Neds brands in Australia, and Tabcorp in the $1bn race for the WA TAB.

Matt Tripp’s Betr is set to win the WA wagering licence.

Matthew Tripp’s wagering group Betr is set to win the West Australian wagering licence.

Betr is understood to have won over Entain Group, the owner of the Ladbrokes and Neds brands in Australia, and Tabcorp in the $1bn race for the WA TAB.

A preferred bidder is set to be announced by the WA government later this month, capping a process that began in October last year when the state began a sale process that has stalled due to the onset of Covid in 2020.

Betr, the newly formed bookmaker, will launch across Australia on Wednesday ahead of the weekend’s Everest and Caulfield Cup race meetings and the biggest betting period of the year ahead of the Melbourne Cup.

The business, headed up by wagering mogul Mr Tripp and chief executive Andrew Menz, is backed by an ownership group including News Corp Australia – publisher of The Australian – and Las Vegas-based Tekkorp Capital. Its technology is supplied by ASX-listed Betmakers Technology.

Entain, Betr and Tabcorp would not comment about the outcome of the bidding process, while a WA government spokesman said the state would not comment ahead of any official confirmation of the winning bid.

Washington H. Soul Pattinson, the ASX-listed group with $10bn in investments, is poised to join the Betr consortium should the winning bid be confirmed.

Sources familiar with the transaction have previously indicated that Betr executives have been working on convincing Seven West Media to join the bid.

WSHP is one of the oldest companies on the ASX and holds large stakes in a range of listed companies such as Brickworks and TPG Telecom, as well as a portfolio of blue-chip stocks. The firm also has more than $650m invested in its own private equity holdings, including electrical engineering company Ampcontrol, Ironbark Asset Management and agriculture and water assets.

The Betr investment would probably sit in the Soul Patts private equity portfolio that in June accounted for about 7 per cent of the group’s total assets.

Mr Menz, who worked with Mr Tripp at CrownBet before that business was taken over in a global deal between The Stars Group and Flutter Entertainment in 2019, said at the weekend that Betr would target a younger demographic than its competitors.

“To be in front of that younger, more dynamic and forward-thinking audience is really important to the brand we are building at Betr,” he said.

Meanwhile, the news of Tabcorp potentially losing the bid has been received positively.

Shares in Tabcorp rose in trading soon after The Australian revealed early on Monday afternoon that Betr was set to be the winning bidder.

Tabcorp shareholders have been lukewarm about the prospect of the betting giant paying a large sum for the WA TAB, preferring new chief executive Adam Rytenskild to concentrate on a strategy to improve his company’s digital wagering offerings.

“I want us to be different as a company. We are loosening the handcuffs a bit and we want our culture to be about transforming and changing,” Mr Rytenskild recently told The Australian. He said Tabcorp’s new app was designed to be a “new digital foundation” for the business.

Tanarra Capital, the asset management firm run by investment banker John Wylie, believes Tabcorp needs to show fiscal discipline while concentrating on rolling out digital betting services to its customers, and had risked paying too much for the WA retail betting licence.

Vidhur Rangaswamy, a portfolio manager at Tanarra, recently told The Australian that Tabcorp should not adopt a “have it at any cost” mentality for the WA licence. “We do want Tabcorp to show discipline in this instance. Putting a high value for that (retail betting) is not where the market and the world is at the moment, and doubling down on that business at that sort of big value is not preferable,” he said.

Tabcorp now has virtually no market share in WA, where the state-owned wagering business has owned the TAB brand (Tabcorp has rights to it throughout the rest of Australia). When the business is privatised, Tabcorp will be able to promote its products more freely in WA.

Tabcorp shares rose 1.6 per cent on Monday to 97c.

Entain has been mooted as potentially targeting Tabcorp in a takeover bid.

It had a $3.5bn bid rejected by Tabcorp’s board last year, though Tabcorp did split its lottery arm into the ASX-listed The Lottery Corporation.