Big betting and machines boost Ladbrokes profits
Ladbrokes, one of the biggest bookmakers, beat analysts' forecasts on Thursday as high-stake gaming machines and big-betting gamblers with telephone accounts boosted profit.
RBS profits up 9 percentLadbrokes, which has 2,200 betting shops in the UK, said pretax profit for the year to end-December rose to 344.2 million pounds from 238.1 million a year ago.
Gross win, its profit after paying out winning bets, increased to 1.286 billion pounds from 990.3 million in 2006.
Gross win from highly lucrative gaming machines, known as Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs), rose 21 percent, while profits from its big betting customers jumped to 183.6 million pounds from 17.3 million last financial year.
Excluding the 'high rollers', operating profit decreased by 4.4 percent to 241 million pounds.
"Ladbrokes has made a positive start to the year with gross win and operating profit ahead of last year in each of European Retail, eGaming and Telephone Betting," Ladbrokes said in a statement.
It added that its gross win in the first seven weeks of the year, excluding its big betting customers, was up 16 percent.
(Reporting by Marc Jones, editing by Will Waterman)
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