As it has just been announced, William Hill has acquired Grand Parade company specializing in betting and gaming digital solutions. The deal reached £13.5 million (€16 million/$17.9 million).
The transaction will include cash and shares; the bookmaker will issue 495,048 new ordinary shares of 10 pence each to Grand Parade.
Grand Parade was founded in 2007 and since then has created applications, websites and e-commerce platforms for the sports betting, gaming and media industries.
Philip Bowcock, interim chief executive of William Hill, said: “Bringing the Grand Parade team into William Hill will rapidly ramp up the scale of our development team by backfilling existing resource gaps and also enhance our creative capabilities.
“This enables us to capitalise on the potential of our Trafalgar front-end platform by accelerating our product development and also to support the work with OpenBet to build our new back-end platform.”
At the same time, William Hill has also recently enter into a partnership with English Premier League football club Everton and the Scottish Football Association (SFA). The deal will see the partnership to last for two years, from the 2023-17 season until the end of the 2017-18 campaign.
Owing to the signed deal, William Hill will be a club’s official European betting partner and will get the possibility to benefit from branding placement on various surfaces inside the team’s Goodison Park home stadium, including LED advertising boards and interview backdrops.
Additionally, the bookmaker will be responsible for providing an improved betting concourse at the ground and utilise the club’s platforms to connect with fans in the UK and across Europe.
Alan McTavish, head of commercial at Everton, said: “Ahead of an exciting new season we look forward to working together with William Hill, a company that prides itself on innovation, history and heritage just like Everton, and developing a long-term partnership that covers traditional betting and the emerging interactive markets.”
