William Hill parent company evoke remains confident in its revenue targets for 2025 after recording growth across both its online and retail units in the first half of the year.
The LSE-listed multinational has provided a brief snapshot into its H1/Q2 trading, with revenue for the first six months of 2025 rising 3%, attributed largely to growth in gaming.
Online gaming in general stood as the clear growth driver with evoke citing a 6% figure for this sector. As online betting and gaming makes up the vast majority of the group’s portfolio, this isn’t overly surprising.
Evoke, formerly 888holdings, manages the 888 group of brands (betting, casino and poker), the Mr Green casino, and William Hill, the latter encompassing retail and online operations.
However, its retail unit did return to growth this year, attributed to the completion of the rollout of 5,000 new machines across its retail estate in March. This will have upgraded much of the gaming hardware across the 1,400 William Hill betting shops.
This continues a trend which has seen some of the UK’s main retail betting groups maintain growth in the face of online gaming’s rapid growth over recent years, something which has come at the expense of retail betting. Entain, operator of the Ladbrokes and Coral high-street mainstays, reported siilar growth for its retail divison in its Q1 report, for example.
“I am pleased to report an improvement in the growth rate during Q2, with Retail returning to growth and continued double-digit performance in our International Core Markets.” said Per Widerström, CEO of evoke.
“Q2 2025 marked our second strongest quarterly revenue performance since the beginning of 2023, a particularly encouraging result given the tough comparator from lapping the Euros.
“Importantly, this growth was also delivered profitably, in line with our focus on sustainable profitable growth, with H1 Adjusted EBITDA significantly ahead year-over-year, supporting our strong deleveraging trajectory in line with the value creation plan.”
2024 v 2025 – a tough comparison
While H1 showed good form for evoke’s retail assets, perhaps validating the hefty buyout of William Hill for £1.95bn back in 2021, the group has also acknowledged some difficult comparatives with the year prior.
The Euros in particular provided a tough comparative for evoke, impacting sports margins due to the significant betting interest this tournament generates. The company is not alone in this, however, with Betsson acknowledging similar tricky comparatives in its H1 report last week.
On top of growth, evoke has expressed confidence in its cost controls during H1, expecting adjusted EBITDA to be in excess of £360m as a result. As mentioned above, this has given the group renewed confidence in achieving its 2025 targets, anticipating revenue growth of between 5-9% and an AEBTIDA margin of at least 20% at the close of the year.
Widerström concluded: “Alongside the improved Q2 performance, we continue to transform the Group’s capabilities for the mid- and long-term. We are strengthening our competitive advantages and better aligning our leading brands and products to a clearer customer value proposition.
“Our disciplined strategy with clear focus on our Core Markets and driving operational excellence is delivering improved profitability and enabling further deleveraging. I look forward to sharing more detail on our progress and plans at our Interim Results in August.”
