Gambling 911 – Paddy Power, the United Kingdom’s third largest bookmaker, suffered two of its worst weekends in football on record this year. The company’s stock has dropped 4% and CEO Patrick Kennedy has announced his departure in 2015. Kennedy has been CEO of Paddy Power since 2006 with the betting firm enjoying huge success throughout much of his tenure.
Paddy Power, to its credit, has enjoyed a strong growth in sales during the first four months of this year. But two weekends in particular – January 11-13th and March 22nd-23rd of this year- managed to cause significant enough damage to the company’s bottom line. Both weekends saw nine of the ten favourites in the Premiership win, resulting in Paddy Power having to pay out on all accumulator bets which tracked the favourites. Typically, on any given weekend, 54 per cent of favourites will win. All bookmakers were negatively impacted by these two weekends, it should be noted.
Looking to the full year, the company said that it expects the impact of the adverse sports results “to be largely offset by the impact of positive top-line momentum, the recycling of winnings by customers, favourable exchange rate movements and the later than expected introduction of the Irish online and phone betting tax.”
