Bet365 CEO Coates still pockets £270m as US losses hit
Bet365 invested heavily in expanding into the North American market and recorded a pre-tax loss of 72.6 million pounds ($93 million), according to the company's latest filing.
However, it's unclear whether the company's public-shy CEO Dennis Coates received the memo. The company paid out £270.7 million ($345 million) in the year to March 2023, up from £213 million ($272 million) the previous year. She is now the richest woman in Britain, according to Yahoo Finance.
At first glance, it looks like she got the memo. Coats' pay package may be one of the highest among executive pay this year, but it's relatively tame for Coates. In 2020, as the company's majority shareholder, she received a salary of £421 million ($537 million) and an additional £48 million ($61 million) in dividends. That’s more than all the CEOs in the FTSE 100 combined.
Based on an average (UK) working week of 38 hours, Coates will earn around £237,348 ($303,000) per hour this year. That works out to £3,955 per minute.
Not bad for a woman who started her business in a portable building in a car park in Stoke-on-Trent, a nondescript town in England's industrial Midlands.
"Disproportionate"
Coates' pay cut this year is just 10 times the salary of any other FTSE 100 boss. It also surpassed Wall Street's highest-paid boss, Blackstone Group's Stephen Schwarzman, with $253 million.
Most entrepreneurs gain wealth through dividends or stock distributions. However, since Bet365 is a private company owned almost entirely by her family, the majority of Coates' wealth comes from her salary.
This also makes her a big taxpayer. With donations of £460m last year, she may even become the UK's largest single taxpayer. But that has failed to appease campaign groups such as the High Pay Center, which called Coates' pay package "neither fair nor proportionate."
"Ultimately, Britain's prosperity depends on how the wealth generated by our economy is distributed," said Luke Hildyard, chief executive of the organization, a think tank dedicated to reducing economic equality.
Hildyard added: “Spending hundreds of millions of pounds every year on top of the wealth of billionaires is not a good way to maximize living standards and it exaggerates the contributions of the super-rich.”
WM Enhancement
Despite falling profits, Bet365 reported revenue up 19% year-on-year to £3.39 billion ($4.32 billion), driven by betting on the 2023 World Cup in Qatar. Sports betting still accounts for the largest share, at £2.65 billion ($3.38 billion). Online casino gaming also grew 31% to £715 million ($912 million).
As usual, Bet365 does not break out revenue by region, largely because the company is believed to derive a significant amount of its revenue from the black market in China. The company is launching in multiple U.S. regulated markets in fiscal 2022-2023, including Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, Kentucky and Louisiana.
"Entering new markets requires significant initial investment. However, the directors remain confident that these markets will make a significant contribution to the group over the coming period," the company said in a statement.
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Source: www.casino.org
