William Hill shares dive 11% on revenue alert

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

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

It now anticipates full-year operating earnings to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, down from ₤ 291.4 m last year. As an outcome, the FTSE 250 business saw its shares drop nearly 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 ended up 6% in spite of reporting a 20% drop in full-year earnings to ₤ 512m.

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

William Hill stated there were two main elements behind the weaker-than-expected efficiency from its online organization.

It stated it had actually seen "a velocity in the number of time-outs and automatic self-exclusions over current weeks", measures which enable punters to halt betting with a bookmaker.

William Hill stated that while the pattern was "still developing, we estimate that, ought to these trends continue around present levels, the ensuing lower incomes will reduce online's revenues by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".

Secondly, its earnings margins were lower than expected since of European football outcomes and recently's Cheltenham horseracing festival, where bookmakers were struck by big a variety of favourites winning races.

William Hill said that in spite of its online issues, the broader group continued "to trade well" and was in line with expectations.

The company likewise said it remained in "innovative conversations" to buy Openbet, a gaming software application firm.

Sterling weak

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

Earlier the retailer had released a statement saying that it expected full-year hidden earnings to be "at or around the bottom" of a previously approximated variety. The statement was issued following comments that creator Mike Ashley made to the yohaig code Times newspaper on Tuesday.

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

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