Bet365 Boss Paid More Than £260 Million
Bet365 boss Denise Coates has collected annual pay and dividends of more than £260 million. The sum is one of the biggest ever pay awards in the world, but is substantially lower than £471 million pay packet she collected in 2020. The online sportsbook’s profits took a dive as the company invested heavily in attracting new players in emerging markets.
Denise Coates was one of the first entrepreneurs to recognize the potential of online gambling. ©Pixabay/Pexels
Wage Disparity
Bet365’s multibillionaire joint CEO Denise Coates has been paid an incredible £263 million in annual pay and dividends. The entrepreneur, who launched Bet365 in a portacabin in Stoke-on-Trent in 2000, received a salary of £213 million for the year to March 2022. According to the latest accounts published by the online bookmaker, Coates is also entitled to at least 50% of the year’s £100 million dividend.
Coates’ £263 million pay is certainly large, but is not record-breaking. Despite earning more than £1 million for each working day this year, the sum is 12% lower than the pay package she collected in 2021. Last year she was paid £300 million after the sportsbook chose to pay out less profit, funneling millions into international expansion plans.
The year before, the joint CEO earned her largest payday to date, a staggering £471 million. At the time, that figure broke records, marking the Coates family as some of the UK’s largest taxpayers. Her £421 million salary, plus a dividend of around £45 million, took her earnings to over £1 billion in four years.
The total figure paid out to Denise Coates now stands at nearly £1.5 billion since 2016. Despite the recent drop in her pay package, Coates is likely to keep her status as the world’s best paid woman. However, her earnings have been met with criticism at a time when many in the UK are having to tighten their purse strings.
Speaking on behalf of the High Pay Centre, director Luke Hildyard described her pay as ‘hopelessly inefficient’. The think tank campaigns against economic inequality, with a focus on top pay. Speaking to BBC News, spokesman Andrew Speke called on the government to take action against too much money going to too few people. Speke stated:
“It shows if the government wanted to provide greater support to those struggling and increase the pay of striking public sector workers facing real wage cuts, increasing tax on high incomes and wealth would be one of the most effective ways of funding this.”
Online Gambling Trailblazer
Labour MP Carolyn Harris also hit out against Coates’ huge salary. Harris, who co-chairs a cross-party parliamentary group investigating gambling-related harms, said that the losses of gamblers during a time in which the cost of living is rising are paying for the excessive salaries of gambling bosses.
Harris also urged the government to pick up the pace on publishing its Gambling Act Review white paper. The review, which was launched in December 2020, has been set back by numerous delays including the Covid-19 pandemic and fall-outs within the Tory party. The government recently stated that it expects to publish its white paper within the coming weeks.
More than twenty years on from founding the Bet365 website, Coates is considered to be one of the richest women in the UK and amongst the best-paid bosses in the world. After gaining a first-class degree in econometrics at the University of Sheffield, Coates set her sights on taking gambling online.
She expanded her father’s Provincial Racing to nearly 50 betting shops before mortgaging them all and taking the business online. Her £19,000 purchase of the Bet365.com domain name marked the beginning of her continuing success story. Coates has been praised for her decision to keep Bet365 based in Stoke. The bookmaker is now the area’s largest private sector employer.
In 2012, she was awarded a CBE for services to the community and business. In Stoke she has been affectionately given the moniker ‘the patron of the Potteries’. The world-famous sportsbook remains firmly a family business. While Denise is the majority shareholder, she is joint-chief executive alongside her brother John. Her father Peter Coates is the chairman of Bet365. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the Coates family have a combined fortune of £8.6 billion.
Profits Dive
During the last financial year, Bet365’s profits have fallen significantly. The operator made a pre-tax profit of £49.8 million for the year, down from the £469 million profit reported the year previously. This was in part due to its ownership of Stoke City Football Club, which lost £26.2 million.
Over 2022, gambling revenues for the firm increased by 2% to £2.85 billion. While sports betting revenues fell by 2%, this was ameliorated by a 25% rise in online gaming revenues. The drop in Bet365’s profits was largely attributed to an extra £320 million spent on administration expenses after a pandemic boom.
The operator spent significantly on advertising in new markets and the expansion of its IT infrastructure. Investments into technology were also made in an effort to support the expansion of the business. The Denise Coates Foundation was responsible for around £100 million in charitable donations.
Amongst the new locations in which it launched were Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, Ontario and Colorado. The sportsbook’s roster of staff also increased, from 5,400 the year previously to 6,100. Bet365 now operates in eighteen local markets around the world. An analyst at Regulus Partners, Paul Leyland, explained how the firm would have to work harder to acquire new customers. Leyland said that:
“During the first stage of the pandemic, existing customers had more time and more money to bet online, so Bet365 benefited from increasing gross margins without much cost increase.”
However, during the most recent financial year Bet365 has had to increase its marketing budgets to gain lower-spending players in emerging markets, due to increased local competition. Leyland estimates that the average revenue per customer fell by around 30%.
