PMU Expands Base Ahead of Move Into Sports Betting

Amid preparations to branch out from its traditional horseracing focus into general sports betting, France's PMU has launched a promotional predictions website for the 2009/10 National Rugby League Championship, offering free prizes to French registrants.

As an official sponsor of the French Rugby League, PMU has launched pronosovales.com, a community site for French rugby fans which offers registered users the chance to win prizes ranging from pre-credited PMU accounts and games consoles to rugby balls and jerseys.

The free to play site features a number of daily prediction games including Match Winners, Best Defence and Most Points per Game, and will run from September 14th to November 5th 2009.

Philippe Germond, Chairman of PMU, admitted earlier this month that the company was preparing to launch a complete sports betting offering once liberalisation of the French online gaming market takes place in early 2010, with football and rugby identified as being key to future growth.

While the company is currently limited by French law in the preparations that it can make to effectively complete in a free market, the use of free-to-play sites such as pronosovales.com and its previous Tour de France site, sprintgagnant.fr, are enabling PMU to build a customer database outside of horseracing in a legally compliant manner.