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Restructuring and finance costs tripled 2024 post-tax losses at UK gambling company Evoke, it said on Wednesday, although the chief executive of the William Hill owner insisted its turnaround strategy was starting to pay off.
The company blamed the losses — of £191mn for 2024, compared with £65.2mn the year before — on a series of integration and transformation costs, as well as finance costs related to its debt-funded 2021 acquisition of William Hill.
The one-off items — which included the costs of leaving the US consumer business — amounted to £79.3mn.
For 2025, the company said it expected first-quarter revenue growth in the low single-digit percentages, as a result of safer gambling measures. The figure is lower than the 5 to 9 per cent growth that the company is projecting for the full year.
Shares in Evoke, which last year changed its name from 888, were down 17 per cent in morning trading in London, at 56.6p.
Evoke said it had been focusing on its core markets of the UK, Italy, Spain, Romania and Denmark, which now accounted for 90 per cent of its revenue. It said it had also been moving towards using common platforms for its different brands and territories to improve efficiency.
Chief executive Per Widerström told the Financial Times it was a “true inflection point” that the company recorded revenue growth for 2024 after it reported pro forma declines for both 2023 and 2022.
Revenue grew by 3 per cent, to £1.75bn, which the company attributed to growth in online products, with acceleration in the second half of the year. The UK online business had returned to growth, it said.
“In the reset of the business [to] bring back the business to profit growth, we’ve had to take some really decisive and bold decisions on the back of the new strategy,” Widerström said.
Evoke’s efforts to revive its fortunes follow a period marked by a series of compliance failings.
In 2023, an internal investigation found the company had failed to follow anti-money laundering processes correctly for VIP customers in the Middle East.
In the same year, William Hill was hit with a record £19.2mn fine from the Gambling Commission, the UK’s gaming regulator, over poor consumer protections and weak anti-money laundering controls. Those predated Evoke’s ownership of the group.
