Irish bookmaker Paddy Power has cited unfavorable football and horse racing results for an anticipated fall in full-year operating profits.
In a trading update for the period covering July 1 to November 17, the company said that its full-year operating profit for 2013 is likely to be around €11 million ($14.9 million) lower than the figure it forecast three months ago.
Paddy Power highlighted unexpected results in the Australian Spring Horse Racing Carnival and the Uefa Champions League club football tournament.
“We now expect low to mid single digit percentage operating profit growth in 2013 in constant currency, before currency translation headwinds of 3%,” Paddy Power said. “This is approximately €11 million lower than the mid-point of our guidance at the time of our interim results.”
Paddy Power reported an operating profit increase of 12% to €75.4 million during the first half of the year, with its online division driving revenues up by 22%. In addition, online sports turnover, excluding Australian operations, was up 15% on the corresponding period in 2012. Australian online revenue also grew by 26%, while retail increased by 5%.
Meanwhile Paddy Power has claimed that it has reduced the time required to upgrade its applications due to the rollout of open source, cloud automation tools.
According to the Computerworlduk.com website, Paddy Power rolled out its Opscode’s Chef automation tools in March of this year as part of a move to simplify configuration and deployment of server resources from its data centers running on a CloudStack platform.
