William Hill shares dive 11% on profit alert
(Close): William Hill shares shut down more than 11% after the bookie warned on profits.
It stated online trading had been hit by harder policy and "the worst Cheltenham results in recent history".
It now anticipates full-year operating revenue to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, below ₤ 291.4 m last year. As an outcome, the FTSE 250 company saw its shares drop nearly 40p to 331p.
However, the benchmark FTSE 100 ended flat, up 6.4 points at 6199.1.
Top riser on the FTSE 100 was B&Q owner Kingfisher. Its shares ended up 6% in spite of reporting a 20% drop in full-year profits to ₤ 512m.
However, when restructuring expenses were stripped out, underlying earnings were a better-than-expected ₤ 686m.
William Hill stated there were two main aspects behind the yohaig code weaker-than-expected performance from its online company.
It stated it had actually seen "a velocity in the variety of time-outs and automatic self-exclusions over recent weeks", measures which allow punters to stop betting with a bookmaker.
William Hill stated that while the pattern was "still evolving, we approximate that, should these patterns continue around current levels, the yohaig code ensuing lower incomes will lower online's earnings by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".
Secondly, its earnings margins were lower than expected because of European football outcomes and last week's Cheltenham horseracing festival, where bookmakers were struck by large a variety of races.
William Hill said that regardless of its online problems, the wider group continued "to trade well" and remained in line with expectations.
the yohaig code company also said it was in "advanced discussions" to invest in Openbet, a gaming software firm.
Sterling weak
Elsewhere on the London market, shares in Sports Direct were having another bad day, down a further 5.6% after dropping about 10% on Tuesday.
Earlier the seller had released a statement stating that it anticipated full-year hidden profits to be "at or around the bottom" of a previously estimated range. The statement was provided following comments that creator Mike Ashley made to the Times newspaper on Tuesday.
On the currency markets, the pound remained weak after having actually fallen dramatically on Tuesday in the wake of the fear attacks in Brussels, which were viewed as increasing the likelihood of the UK ballot to leave the yohaig code EU.
On Wednesday, sterling fell almost 1% against the dollar to $1.4087. Against the euro, it lost 0.4% to EUR1.2623.
