William Hill PLC is pleased to announce that it has acquired leading betting and gaming digital solutions firm Grand Parade Limited for a consideration of £13.6 million, payable in cash and shares.
Established in 2007, Grand Parade develops apps, e-commerce platforms for betting, game and media business and websites and employs a staff of approximately 200 creatives and developers who are housed in Grand Parade’s offices situate in London, Poland, New York, Krakow and Bermondsey.
Grand Parade supplies technology for a number of William Hill’s competitors which include Coral, Ladbrokes and Betfair.
Grand Parade assisted in the launch of the Betfair Predicts election betting app, the new Football Pools app, Ladbrokes’ news sites, Coral Bet’s in-play product and more.
Philip Bowcock, Interim Chief Executive Officer of William Hill, commented on the new acquisition by saying that bringing the Grand Parade team into William Hill will rapidly ramp up the scale of their development team by backfilling existing resource gaps and also enhance their creative capabilities.
Bowcock went on to say that this enables them to capitalize on the potential of their Trafalgar front-end platform by accelerating their product development and also to support the work with OpenBet to build their new back-end platform.
Grand Parade founder Chief Executive Officer Andy Clerkson revealed that the acquisition reflected the “high regard William Hill have placed on the creative and technical expertise they have provided their customers and will continue to do in future.
Grand Parade’s non-executive chairman John O’Reilly has left the company as a result of the acquisition.
In terms of the acquisition and as partial consideration, William Hill will issue 495,048 new Ordinary Shares of 10p each to Grand Parade which will rank pari passu with the Company’s existing ordinary shares.
