William Hill acquires software developer

William Hill PLC has acquired betting and gaming digital solutions firm Grand Parade Limited for a GBP 13.6 million consideration in cash and shares.

Established in 2007, Grand Parade develops apps, websites and e-commerce platforms for the sports betting, gaming and media industries. 200 developers and creatives are housed in Grand Parade’s offices situated in Bermondsey, London, Krakow, Poland and New York.

“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 enhance our creative capabilities,” commented Philip Bowcock, Interim chief executive officer of William Hill.

“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.”

Under the 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 existing ordinary shares of the Company.

The company said applications have been made for these shares to be admitted to the London Stock Exchange and anticipates trading to commence August 5th 2016.

Grand Parade lists some of its high profile clients within the industry as 32Red, bwin, Sportech, betway, Coral, Ladbrokes and Betfair.