40 1GM Thursday August 6 2020 | the times
Business
William Hill is to return £24.5 million of
furlough funds after a recovery in
revenues as live sport returned and the
national lockdown was eased.
The betting group said yesterday that
it felt it was “appropriate” to repay the
cash after using the scheme to protect
the jobs of 7,000 retail employees.
William Hill is the latest big com-
pany to announce that it will repay
furlough money, with others including
Barratt Developments, Asos and
Games Workshop. William Hill’s
repayment is one of the biggest so far.
The furlough scheme involves the
government paying 80 per cent of an
Bookmaker joins
race to hand back
furlough millions
Dominic Walsh employee’s wages during lockdown to
stave off mass redundancies. So far it
has cost £33.8 billion and has paid the
wages of about 9.6 million people. It is
due to end in October.
William Hill said that it would repay
the money in its interim results. The
company, one of Britain’s biggest
bookmakers, has more than 1,500
high street shops and is valued by at
£1 billion.
Ulrik Bengtsson, chief executive,
said: “We could have kept the money,
but returning it felt like the right thing
to do. We have bounced back and sport
has come back. There are many other
businesses that need it more than us.”
The company also disclosed that it
would not reopen 119 of its shops after
the pandemic amid the shift to online
betting.
Last year, it was forced to close more
than 700 shops in response to the
government’s imposition of a £2 stake
limit on fixed-odds betting terminals.
The latest closure will leave it with 1,414
shops.
It did not expect shopper numbers to
its brick-and-mortar stores to return to
pre-Covid-19 levels, while the cost of
exiting 119 shops would be minimal as it
was taking advantage of early lease
breaks. All but about 16 employees
affected would be redeployed.
William Hill is pressing ahead with
“the next phase of strategic alignment
in the UK”, involving the merger of its
domestic online and retail divisions.
This will result in “a handful” of man-
agement redundancies.
Mr Bengtsson, 48, denied that this
was another signal that betting shops
would eventually disappear. “We actu-
ally feel quite good about our betting
shops,” he said.
Its figures were given a fillip by the
Derby at Epsom, where the first three
horses past the post were all long shots
at 25-1, 50-1 and 66-1. It was William
Hill’s best result in the race since it was
founded in 1934.
The company makes most of its
revenue in Britain, although its inter-
national operations are expanding. In
America, it has taken advantage of the
opening up of sports betting to establish
a presence in 13 states. It is developing a
European online business under its Mr
Green & Co brand.
The group reported a 32 per cent fall
in net revenues to £554.4 million in the
half-year to June and a pre-tax loss of
£14.2 million, compared with a profit of
£50.8 million last time on an adjusted
basis. Dividend payments have been
suspended. On a reported basis, it made
a profit of £141.1 million after an
£81.9 million non-cash hit against the
value of its retail estate was more than
offset by a £200 million VAT rebate on
gaming machines.
The group, which recently raised
£200 million of equity to bolster its
balance sheet, said that after the recent
merger between Eldorado Resorts, its
casino partner, and Caesars Entertain-
ment, it would assume the operation of
Caesars’ 29 sports books — “a combi-
nation of a pub and a betting shop” —
lifting its market share in the United
States to 29 per cent.
Shares of William Hill rose 10½p, or
8.9 per cent, to 127½p yesterday.
e s h w d t c b h £ s b t h b w tCoca-Cola bottler sees
bubbles of profit rising
One of Coca-Cola’s biggest bottlers
cheered investors after reporting
early signs of recovery from the
lockdowns imposed across most of
its markets.
Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling
Company, which operates in 28
countries, said that the decline in
comparable revenue had narrowed
from 36 per cent in April to 5 per cent
last month as it gained market share.
The company’s shares fizzed 165p
higher to £21.98, a rise of more than
8 per cent, as it beat market expecta-
tions in the first half.
Comparable revenues, excluding
the impact of currency translation,
fell 14.7 per cent to €2.83 billion, with
volumes down 9.2 per cent as out-
of-home sales were badly hit by the
pandemic. Comparable op-
erating profit dived by 35.8
per cent to €208.8 million,
while net profit fell by 42.1
per cent to €129 million.
Although its revenues
are improving, the tough
environment is in sharp
contrast to a year ago,
when it was rewarding its
investors with a €730 mil-
lion special dividend “re-
flecting successive years
of strong performance”.
The FTSE 100 soft drinksgroup said that its out-of-home busi-
ness, which typically accounts for
just over 40 per cent of its revenues,
had been severely affected by lock-
downs, but as these were being lifted
sales were starting to return, partic-
ularly in hotels, restaurants and
cafés.
It said that there was also an im-
provement in retail sales for home
consumption. In April, trading had
been hit by customer destocking,
while volumes in May and June had
improved to low-single-digit de-
clines. In July its volumes had re-
turned to growth by a mid-single-
digit percentage.
Coca-Cola HBC traces its origins
to the founding of the Nigerian Bot-
tling Company in 1951. The Hellenic
Bottling Company was incor-
porated in Greece in 1969.
Today’s company, formed in
2000, has a portfolio of more
than 130 brands, including
Costa Coffee, Fanta,
Sprite, Schweppes and
Powerade.
Zoran Bogdanovic, 48,
chief executive, said that
the group’s rapid response
to the pandemic had
ensured that its supply
chain was uninterrupted
and its profitability was
protected in “a very chal-
lenging second quarter”.Dominic WalshT
he rising tide
of struggling
fashion
retailers
taking out
controversial
company voluntary
arrangements is set
to include River
Island (Robert
Miller writes).
The company is
looking to close
some of its stores
and slash rents on
others, according to
Retail Week.
However, executiveshave expressed
concerns over
whether creditors
would approve of its
plans.
A CVA is an
insolvency
procedure generally
used by businesses to
shed unprofitable
leases and to cut
rents on sites it is
keeping.
River Island traces
its roots to 1948,
when Bernard Lewis
began selling
knitting wool from ashop in an east
London bombsite. In
the Sixties the
business became
Chelsea Girl, along
with Concept Man,
and in 1991 the two
brands became
River Island. The
group now has about
350 stores in the UK
and Ireland, as well
as in Asia, theIsland is no haven
in the retail storm