William Hill shares dive 11% on profit alert
(Close): William Hill shares shut down more than 11% after the bookie alerted on revenues.
It stated online trading had been hit by tougher guideline and "the worst Cheltenham results in recent history".
It now anticipates full-year operating earnings to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, below ₤ 291.4 m last year. As a result, the FTSE 250 company saw its shares drop almost 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 completed up 6% in spite of reporting a 20% drop in full-year profits to ₤ 512m.
However, when reorganizing costs were removed out, underlying earnings were a better-than-expected ₤ 686m.
William Hill said there were two main aspects behind the weaker-than-expected performance from its online service.
It said it had seen "an acceleration in the yohaig code number of time-outs and automatic self-exclusions over recent weeks", procedures which enable punters to stop gambling with a bookie.
William Hill said that while the trend was "still progressing, we approximate that, should these patterns persist around present levels, the consequent lower earnings will decrease online's earnings by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".
Secondly, its revenue margins were lower than anticipated because of European football results and recently's Cheltenham horseracing celebration, where bookies were struck by large a variety of favourites winning races.
William Hill said that in spite of its online issues, the yohaig code wider group continued "to trade well" and was in line with expectations.
The business likewise stated it was in "innovative conversations" to invest in Openbet, a video gaming software application firm.
Sterling weak
Elsewhere on the London market, shares in Sports Direct were having another bad day, down an even more 5.6% after dropping about 10% on Tuesday.
Earlier the merchant had issued a statement stating that it expected full-year underlying incomes to be "at or around the bottom" of a formerly approximated range. The statement was released following remarks that founder Mike Ashley made to the Times paper on Tuesday.
On the currency markets, the pound remained weak after having fallen greatly on Tuesday in the wake of the horror attacks in Brussels, which were viewed as increasing the likelihood of the UK ballot to leave the yohaig code EU.
On Wednesday, sterling fell practically 1% versus the dollar to $1.4087. Against the euro, it lost 0.4% to EUR1.2623.
