William Hill shares dive 11% on revenue alert

(Close): William Hill shares shut down more than 11% after the bookie alerted on revenues.

It stated online trading had actually been struck by harder regulation and "the worst Cheltenham results in recent history".

It now expects full-year operating profit to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, down from ₤ 291.4 m in 2015. As a result, the FTSE 250 business saw its shares drop almost 40p to 331p.

However, the benchmark FTSE 100 ended flat, up 6.4 points at 6199.1.

Top riser on the FTSE 100 was B&Q owner Kingfisher. Its shares finished up 6% despite reporting a 20% drop in full-year earnings to ₤ 512m.

However, when reorganizing expenses were removed out, underlying revenues were a better-than-expected ₤ 686m.

William Hill said there were 2 primary factors behind the weaker-than-expected efficiency from its online company.

It stated it had actually seen "a velocity in the number of time-outs and automatic self-exclusions over current weeks", procedures which enable punters to stop gambling with a bookie.

William Hill said that while the trend was "still developing, we approximate that, need to these patterns persist around existing levels, the consequent lower incomes will decrease online's profits by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".

Secondly, its profit margins were lower than expected due to the yohaig code fact that of European football outcomes and recently's Cheltenham horseracing celebration, where bookmakers were hit by large a variety of favourites winning races.

William Hill said that in spite of its online problems, the more comprehensive group continued "to trade well" and remained in line with expectations.

The business likewise stated it was in "sophisticated conversations" to purchase Openbet, a gaming software application company.

Sterling weak

Elsewhere on the London market, shares in Sports Direct were having another bad day, down an even more 5.6% after dropping about 10% on Tuesday.

Earlier the retailer had released a statement saying that it anticipated full-year hidden revenues to be "at or around the bottom" of a previously estimated range. The statement was provided following remarks that creator Mike Ashley made to the yohaig code Times paper on Tuesday.

On the currency markets, the pound remained weak after having actually fallen dramatically on Tuesday in the wake of the horror attacks in Brussels, which were viewed as increasing the probability of the UK ballot to leave the EU.

On Wednesday, sterling fell almost 1% against the dollar to $1.4087. Against the euro, it lost 0.4% to EUR1.2623.