Denise Coates earns £1m a day in 2021-2022 financial year

Bet365 has published its latest public accounts for the financial 2021-2022 year, with the biggest headline representing the pay that the company’s boss, Denise Coates, brought home during the period.

Coates has been one of the best-paid executives worldwide for years now, mostly because bet365 is a privately-owned company, but also owing to its strong profitability and growth-driven culture. Coates' most recent payment is still shy of the £471m she brought home in 2020, but is a significant result, nevertheless.

The executive received her payments as a salary of £213m and a dividend of £50m, out of a total of £100m paid out in dividends. As the company’s controlling shareholder, Coates is entitled to half of the dividend payments. All of this puts her salary per day of the year at roughly £1m.

To date, since 2016, Coates has been paid close to £1.5bn turning her into one of the best-earning female executives, and executives in general, anywhere in the world. The Guardian, which did the original reporting on Coates’ latest payment, sought the opinion of High Pay CenterDirector Luke Hildyard who was skeptical about the rewards paid to the executive.

He argued that there was little justification for the level of pay Coates had received, contrasting it with the "hardships" that ordinary people in Britain were going through, referring to the rising cost of living – often dubbed a crisis.

The Stoke-on-Treat-based business and its boss, though, have been working hard to transform themselves into one of the biggest businesses not just in the United Kingdom, but globally. To date, bet365 is the world’s best-known sportsbook brand and it is likely to remain unchallenged for many years to come.

Nevertheless, bet365’s results for the 2021-22 financial year were not unscathed. In fact, the company had to cope with a significant decline in sports betting, which led to a close to 90% drop in profit. Bet365 has sought another way to recover, though, having focussed on building a sustainable future.

While profits suffered, the company saw an uptick in customer acquisition. The numbers were in fact impressive, reaching more than 48% of new customers added overthe period. In the estimates of Regulus Partners, cited by iGamingBusiness, an industry publication, the near-50% gain in new customers underpinned the company’s results and was in fact a sign of positivity and future strength.

Image credit: Unsplash.com