William Hill acquires Grand Parade

William Hill acquires Grand Parade

2 August 2016

William Hill PLC (LSE: WMH) (William Hill or the Group) has acquired Grand Parade Limited (Grand Parade), the betting and gaming digital solutions company for £13.6m in cash and shares.

Grand Parade is an award-winning software house that creates apps, websites and e-commerce platforms for the sports betting, gaming and media industries. Established in 2007, it has around 200 developers and creatives based in Bermondsey, London and Krakow, Poland.

Philip Bowcock, Interim CEO of William Hill, commented: "Bringing the Grand Parade team into William Hill will rapidly ramp up the scale of our development team by backfilling existing resource gaps and also enhance our creative capabilities. This enables us to capitalise on the potential of our Trafalgar front-end platform by accelerating our product development and also to support the work with OpenBet to build our new back-end platform."

Under the terms of the acquisition and as partial consideration, William Hill will issue 495,048 new Ordinary Shares of 10p each to Grand Parade (the Consideration Shares). The shares will rank pari passu with the existing ordinary shares of the Company. Applications have been made for the Consideration Shares to be admitted to the premium segment of the Official List and to be admitted to trading on the London Stock Exchange's main market for listed securities (Admission). It is currently anticipated that Admission will occur at 8.00 am on Friday, 5 August.

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William Hill, The Home of Betting, is one of the world's leading betting and gaming companies, employing around 16,000 people. Founded in 1934, it is the UK's largest bookmaker with around 2,370 licensed betting offices that provide betting opportunities on a wide range of sporting and non-sporting events, gaming on machines and numbers-based products including lotteries. The Group's Online business (www.williamhill.com) is one of the world's leading online betting and gaming businesses, providing customers with the opportunity to access William Hill's products online, through their smartphone or tablet, by telephone and by text services. William Hill US was established in June 2012 and provides land-based and mobile sports betting services in Nevada, and is the exclusive risk manager for the State of Delaware's sports lottery. William Hill Australia is one of the largest online betting businesses in Australia, established through the acquisition of two businesses in 2013. It offers sports betting products online, by telephone and via mobile devices. William Hill PLC is listed on the London Stock Exchange. The Group generates revenues of c£1.6bn a year.