2021-04-17 18:09:55
The Exploitation of Misfortune and also the story of a family lineage. A very successful story, based, for some, on human weaknesses. For others, on the other hand, in the entrepreneurial capacity of private initiative and, above all, in the genius of a graduate in mathematics and specialist in econometrics, Denise Coates, 57 years old. Between the years 2000 and 2020 she has become the richest woman in the United Kingdom and one of the richest in the world, especially in the last three years. Last year he earned more money than all the presidents of the Ibex-35 combined.
The story begins with the grandfather, a coal miner who worked in the fields of northern England in the 1940s, when there are no less than 20,000 in the West Midlands area. She is followed by her son, Peter Coates, an uneducated man who starts as a waiter in local pubs and ends up founding a catering company to deliver food to the region’s football pitches in his 70s, later buying nine bookmakers locals
Finally, daughter and son, Denise and John. But above all she, Denise, the person who transforms her father’s business when she realizes that the future is online betting and lays the foundations of a global giant dedicated exclusively to internet gambling. All types of games and bets. Bet365 is the gambler’s paradise, the company that allows you to spend 24 hours a day trying your luck from any corner of the world. It is the company that now allows you to bet that George Clooney will be president of the United States in 2024.
What, in the 17th century, was a conglomeration of six small industrial towns in the north of England supported by an economy based on ceramics and, from the 18th century to the mid-20th, on coal mines and, still a a little later, in the steel industry (19th and 20th centuries), it is now a city of 256,000 inhabitants, in the county of Staffordshire, 240 kilometers north of London.
Stoke-on-Trent has services as its main source of income, even the main source of funding for its football team, Stoke, which this season plays in the silver category of English football and the whose master is Peter Coates.
The transition from the 18th and 19th centuries to the 21st is characterized, especially in Western Europe, by deindustrialization and tertiaryisation. In this case, the services are strictly digital. The qualitative leap of the Coates family begins in 2000, when Denise buys the Bet365 brand on Ebay for between 11,000 and 28,000 euros – according to the sources – and launches the online business from prefabricated modules that she installs in a parking lot of an industrial estate in his hometown. Six years later he sells the physical stores.
He started his empire in 2000 by launching the website, and six years later he was selling all the stores
From the Gladstone Pottery Museum, in the historic center of Longton – one of the six original towns that founded Stoke-on-Trent in 1910 – to the headquarters of Bet365, on the outskirts of Hanley – another of the six founding towns – there it is seven kilometers and three centuries away.
The same distance that separates the Industrial Revolution and a Victorian-style digital mobile betting building and a minimalist, sustainable, solar-powered, three-story high building not far away away from where the prefabricated cabins were placed. This building houses 60% of the company’s 4,600 employees globally. It is an almost unique company in the UK betting industry landscape. The rest are distributed, fundamentally, between Malta and Gibraltar, territories with very lax taxation.
Bet365 is special because, unlike William Hill and Ladbrokes Coral, other major competitors, it is a wholly family-owned, limited company, which is not listed on the stock exchange. Denise owns 50.02% of the property. Also, unlike the previous two, until 2015 it was registered exclusively in the United Kingdom, not in any paradise or pseudo-paradise. That year, however, it was officially established in Gibraltar and in 2018 in Malta, officially to have a foot in the European Union (EU) while maintaining the UK branch of the business. Even so, in the last fiscal year (from April 2019 to March 2020), the Bet365 group has paid Her Majesty’s Treasury 708 million euros.
Denise Coates not only broke the monopoly of a male-dominated industry, she revolutionized it with the internet. And the company, without making any moral considerations, has been spectacularly successful. In the last fiscal year, up to March 29, 2020, Bet365 generated a betting volume of more than 35 billion euros, an income of 3.34 billion (despite an 8% fall in relation to the year above) and pre-tax profits of 912 million.
Between April 1, 2019 and March 29, 2020, Coates took home a salary of €485 million plus dividends of €55.3 million. For comparison: the highest paid manager of the Íbex-35, Meinrad Spenger (MásMóvil), received 13.2 million. Coates’ salary, which increased by €166m compared to the previous year, is 12,000 times higher than the Stoke-on-Trent average of just over €28,000 a year. For three years now she has held the top position in the ranking of the highest paid people in the country and is one of the highest paid in the world, along with the owner of Tesla.
Around 600,000 people have problem gambling in the UK
Although Bet365 is the private company that provides the most work in the entire city of Stoke-on-Trent, when residents are asked who Denise Coates is, very few know. And even less would they recognize her in a photograph, nor would they identify her if they passed her on the street. The company does not have a press department. All requests made by the ARA to contact Coates, or his public relations or members of the press team, to answer a few questions, have been ignored. They should be done through the general customer contact phone, little more than a dead end. Denise Coates does not attend to the media when asked. Neither the British nor the Americans nor the Europeans. It is extremely difficult to find his public statements. The last ones go back to the only interview he gave, nine years after (in 2009) he launched the Bet365 website.
Why so much secrecy? Bad conscience, perhaps? Two years ago the Ministry of Culture, Media, Sports and Digital of the United Kingdom came to the conclusion that there were 600,000 people in the country with gambling problems. A 2020 House of Lords report claims that 5% of players contribute 60% of the industry’s profits.
And what does Coates do with so much money? Between 2019 and 2020 he gave 101 million euros to his foundation, which doesn’t even have a website, through which he finances charity works, scholarships and a cooperation project in Malawi. In Stoke-on-Trent Coates’ generosity is everywhere. But she is practically never seen in any act where gambling money has been laundered with her alms. And little more than exceptional is the image of 2012, in which he appears with the award of the Order of the British Empire. More justified than ever, because it has raised a global one.
Uneven impact of covid-19 on the game
Dramatic growth for 888 The Gibraltar-based 888 group has seen its revenue grow dramatically during the year of the pandemic. In total, 707 million euros, a figure that represents a growth of 52% compared to 2019. Pre-tax profits amounted to 96.8 million. Entain almost maintains revenue The Isle of Man-based group, which owns brands such as Ladbrokes and Coral, which are well-known in the UK, saw a slight drop in revenue last year (€3.561 billion ) in relation to those it had had in the previous year (3,655), 2% less. William Hill is suffering badly In 2020, the company had a year-on-year decline of 16% in its sales, with revenues of 1.5 billion euros. Its annual pre-tax profit collapsed and fell 91% compared to 2019 earnings. Codere avoids bankruptcy ‘in extremis’ Originally Spanish, the group has been one step away from bankruptcy throughout 2020, a disaster that has only been avoided by the inflow of capital from foreign funds, up to 70%. The pandemic has taken a heavy toll: revenues fell by 52%, to 594 million, compared to 2019. Good prospects for the flutter group The Flutter group, with brands such as Betfair, Paddy Power and many others, has experienced a 106% growth in revenue in 2020 compared to 2019, totaling 5,063 million euros. All in all, pre-tax profits fell 99%, from 156 million euros to 1.1 million.
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