Ladbrokes announce healthy H1 results

Ladbrokes reported a healthy turn around in the first half results showing revenues rising 12.4% to £661.8 million from the same period last year and profits coming in at £25.2 million compared to a loss in the corresponding period in 2015 of £51.4 million.

Jim  Mullen, chief executive of Ladbrokes, said the company’s decision to increase marketing, develop “multi-channel” betting across different mediums and expand in Australia was also paying off.

He said: “These strong numbers show customers are responding positively to the new strategy at a time when the sporting gods have generally been on our side and we’ve enjoyed some helpful bookmaker friendly results.

“History would strongly dictate that such a run of results in our favour would see customer staking suffer, but encouragingly these numbers firmly buck that trend and combine strong staking and a good margin. However, 130 years of experience in sports betting has shown us that we will endure a run of customer-friendly results and margins will normalise.”

The companies high street business even showed a small increase in win margin up to 17.4% compared to last year H1 of 16%.

Ladbrokes is currently in the process of a merger with former rival Coral that will create a £3.3bn gambling operator giant, however with the merger having some 4,000 high street betting shops the regulator has said that the two companies have to shed 400 units for the agreement to go through.