Bookmaker William Hill snaps up gaming software firm Grand Parade to keep up with digital shift
William Hill has made moves to catch up with the gambling industry's shift to digital with the £13.6m acquisition of digital gaming software firm Grand Parades.
Recently a huge amount of merger and acquisition activity has swept through the gambling sector. Paddy Power and Betfair came together in a £5bn tie-up, while Gala Coral and Ladbrokes merged in a £2.2bn deal. Most recently GVC snapped up Bwin.party for £1bn.
Last month it was announced William Hill's chief executive James Henderson would step down, with the company’s chief financial officer, Philip Bowock, taking over on an interim basis.
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Bowcock said of today's deal:
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 enhancing 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.
It has been a tough couple of months for William Hill.
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Its share price is down over a third from more than 400p in March, when it warned of a £25m fall in online profits in 2016.