Business

Bet365 chief Denise Coates’s salary rises to £221m

Founder also takes at least £50m in dividends despite gambling group’s £69.4m loss last year

The pay-out to Denise Coates, co-founder and chief executive of Bet365, comes despite the group falling to a loss of £69.4 million last year. Photograph: PA Wire

Daniel Thomas
Mon Jan 8 2024 - 09:40

Bet365 chief Denise Coates earned close to £300 million (€348 million) last year in pay and dividends from the UK-based gambling group, confirming her position as one of the world’s best-paid executives.

Ms Coates was paid about £221 million in the year ending March 2023, according to accounts filed at Companies House on Monday, an increase on her salary of £213 million last year. She also took at least half of the £100 million the company paid out in dividends, given her stake as the founder of Bet365.

This year’s payout comes despite the group falling to a pretax loss of £72.6 million, from a profit of close to £50 million in 2022, as it expanded in regions such as North America.

The group is also the majority owner of Stoke City Football Club, which reported an annual loss of £12.4 million, albeit an improvement on the £26.3 million loss the year before.

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Ms Coates is one of the wealthiest businesspeople in the UK, having earned more than £1 billion in pay and dividends over the past few years.

Her pay at the family-owned company dwarfs the remuneration offered by listed FTSE 100 groups, where Pascal Soriot, boss of pharma group AstraZeneca, was the highest-paid executive in 2022 with annual earnings of about £15 million.

Ms Coates also narrowly trumps the best-paid executives in the US S&P 500, where Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman earned $253 million (€230 million) last year and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai was paid $226 million in total remuneration.

Ms Coates, who founded the company in Stoke-on-Trent more than two decades ago and kept the business in the area, is one of the UK’s highest taxpayers. Bet365 also donated £100 million to the Denise Coates Foundation, a registered charity.

Ms Coates’s salary peaked at £421 million in 2020, but dropped to £250 million in 2021 and then to £213 million in 2022. This means that she has earned £1.1 billion through her annual salary alone in just four years. The group, which is more than 50 per cent owned by Coates, also paid out £100 million in dividends in 2023 and 2022, £97.5 million in 2021 and £95 million in 2020.

On Monday, the group said revenues rose to £3.4 billion in the year to March 2023, up from £2.9 billion the year before, with the majority from sports betting. The increase reflected the expansion into new markets, with a launch of operations in the US and Canada in 2022, but this also led to a “significant increase in costs”, the group said.

More than 20 US states have now legalised online sports betting, offering the world’s largest gambling companies a new and fast-growing market to target.

Paul Leyland, an analyst at Regulus Partners, said Bet365′s “ability to leverage its historical in-play strength and 20 years of brand investment probably has several more years of growth and resilience to deliver”.

But he warned that costs were likely to continue to increase faster than revenue from now on, exacerbated by growing its US business.

“Whether or not Bet365 deploys its balance sheet for regenerative M&A or continues to be a reliable but less-threatening cash machine for its owners then becomes a very big question for the gambling industry as a whole.”

- Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024

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