Online Gambling - WillHill

The company was founded by William Hill in 1934 at a time when gambling was illegal in Britain. It changed hands many times being acquired by Sears Holdings in 1971, then by Grand Metropolitan in 1988, then by Brent Walker in 1989. In September 1996 Brent Walker recouped £117m of the £685m it paid for William Hill when Grand Metropolitan were found to have exaggerated the company’s profits at the time of the sale.

Japanese investment bank Nomura mounted a £700m leveraged buyout of William Hill in 1997, when Brent Walker collapsed with debts exceeding £1.3bn after an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office which saw two directors given jail sentences. In February 1999 a proposed stock market flotation was abandoned due to “weak interest” and Nomura offloaded the company to venture capitalists Cinven and CVC Capital Partners for £825m instead. The company was eventually listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2002. The following year Chief Executive David Harding was awarded a £2.84m bonus, making him the UK’s fifth highest paid company director in 2003.

It acquired Sunderland Greyhound Stadium in 2002 and Brough Park Greyhound Stadium in 2003. In June 2004 Chief Executive David Harding sold £5.2m of shares to fund his divorce, precipitating a share crash and wiping £75m off the value of the company. In 2005 William Hill bought 624 betting offices in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Isle of Man and Jersey from Stanley Leisure for £504 million: the acquisition briefly took the company past Ladbrokes into first position in the UK betting market in terms of shops but not revenue. The Office of Fair Trading made William Hill sell 78 of the 624 Stanley shops due to concerns over anti-competitive practices. Amidst fears that William Hill had overpaid for the Stanley shops, the company was relegated from the FTSE 100 index in December 2005.

In 2008 Ralph Topping was appointed Chief Executive: he took a Saturday job at a William Hill betting shop near Hampden Park, Glasgow, in 1973 and worked his way up through the ranks. He had dropped out of Strathclyde University as a self-confessed ‘rascal’. In November 2008 William Hill went into partnership with Israeli software company Playtech, to remedy its own failing online operation.

Under the terms of the deal William Hill paid Playtech’s founder Teddy Sagi, £144.5m for various assets and affiliate companies. These included several ‘rogue’ online casino sites which William Hill continues to run under the name WHG. Playtech took a 29% stake in the new William Hill Online entity. The company wrote-off a reported £26m when scrapping their previous in-house system. In June 2009 William Hill backed Playtech despite their partner having a quarter of its stock market value wiped out following a profits warning.