evoke launched a strategic review on Wednesday to explore options for maximising shareholder value. Its potential demise can be traced back to 888’s infatuation with William Hill.
888 Holdings plc., now evoke plc. had a market capitalisation of £590 million following its initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange in September 2005.
Fast-forward twenty years and evoke has a market cap of £98.36 million after seeing its share price jump by more than 14 per cent on Wednesday, when the company announced a strategic review to explore “a range of potential alternatives to maximise shareholder value”.
The announcement that the company could be put up for sale marks a sorry end to the story of one of the first online gaming companies.
There have been many trials and tribulations over the past twenty years since 888 went public, including the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006; several failed takeover attempts by Ladbrokes between 2006 and 2011; a number of acquisitions that failed to deliver the value that was expected from them; and a failed foray into B2B.
In the meantime, 888’s rivals were consolidating at a rapid pace and in February 2015, William Hill approached 888 with a takeover offer in the region of £750 million. But 888 didn’t want to be acquired, it wanted to be the acquirer.
Riding high on a market cap of £605 million, 888 turned to bwin.party (now Entain) with an acquisition offer in May 2015, which was accepted in July 2015 at a price of £898 million. But by the end of the year, 888 had to walk away from that deal after being outbid by GVC, which ultimately went on to acquire bwin.party in a transaction valued at over £1.1 billion.
Having been gazumped by GVC, 888 turned its focus back to a now struggling William Hill as it teamed up with Rank Group in July 2016 to make a £3 billion bid for William Hill. The response from the board of directors of William Hill was blunt: “it is not clear that a combination of William Hill with 888 and Rank will enhance William Hill’s strategic positioning or deliver superior value to William Hill’s strategy”. The offer was rejected one month later.
Instead of selling to 888, William Hill proposed a reverse takeover of Amaya, the company that had snapped up PokerStars, NYX Gaming and OpenBet, but that bid was also doomed to failure.
By 2018, 888 had given up on making a transformational acquisition, despite analysts’ musings that it should merge with Paddy Power Betfair (now Flutter Entertainment). It chose instead to go after smaller bolt-on acquisitions.
By the end of 2019, 888’s shareholders were beginning to lose confidence in the company as they watched its rivals continue to consolidate and grow. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which provided a reprieve for 888’s online-only casino-focused business.
After posting record revenues in 2019 and 2020, 888 was riding high again, but it was still obsessed with one vertical in its otherwise flourishing business – sports betting. With that in mind, 888 established an M&A ‘hit squad’ in London in May 2021 under the watchful eye of chief strategy officer Vaughan Lewis.
Lewis had a three-pronged strategy: build the business through strategic and transformational M&A; increase investment to drive higher returns and longer-term returns; and build an investor relations and corporate communications team to articulate this vision to corporate shareholders.
“We are into another wave of M&A,” Lewis said at the time. “There are not an unlimited number of opportunities.”
That is when 888 came back to William Hill, agreeing a deal with Caesars Entertainment in September 2021 to acquire William Hill’s non-US business for a cash consideration of £834.9 million at closing.
“The acquisition of William Hill International is a transformational and hugely exciting moment in 888’s history,” said the company’s then chief executive, Itai Pazner. “This transaction will create one of the world’s leading online betting and gaming groups with superior scale, exceptional brands, increased diversification, and a platform for strong growth. We are also excited about the opportunities that the retail business provides and see significant brand benefits to the enlarged group from its large estate.”
That sentiment was not echoed by industry analysts who questioned the logic of acquiring 1,400 retail betting shops at a time when people were only just coming out of lockdown restrictions caused by the covid pandemic.
This was the same business that Caesars chief executive Tom Reeg had described as William Hill’s “lame duck brands in a number of markets that it didn’t make a lot of sense to invest a lot of money in”.
The £2 stake limit imposed on fixed-odds betting terminals in 2019 had already led to the closure of 713 William Hill shops in the United Kingdom and more closures followed as gambling’s shift to online channels accelerated through the pandemic.
As this dawned on 888, the company renegotiated its deal with Caesars in April 2022. With the acquisition yet to reach completion, 888 renegotiated the terms to pay £584.9 million at closing, down from the previously agreed £834.9 million.
888 said that the revised acquisition agreement reflected “the change in the macro-economic and regulatory environment since the announcement of the acquisition” but maintained that the “strong strategic and financial rationale for the acquisition remains unchanged”.
888’s acquisition of William Hill completed in July 2022, just as 888’s pre-tax profit for the half-year period fell by 65 per cent year-on-year due to the normalisation of digital spend post-pandemic, as well as the introduction of more stringent customer affordability checks in the UK. Interest rates were also rising rapidly.
By the end of that year, 888 was working on a debt reduction plan to address the “more challenging operating environment” it faced and then abruptly parted ways with chief executive Itai Pazner in January 2023. Two months later, William Hill was ordered to pay a record penalty of £19.2 million for “widespread and alarming” social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures in the UK.
Seasoned gaming executive Per Widerström took over as CEO of 888 in July 2023, aiming to leverage the combination of 888 and William Hill to create “a clear global industry leader”.
This led to the termination of 888’s sportsbook partnership with Sports Illustrated in the United States and a wider review of US operations which ultimately saw the company exit the market and sell its US consumer business to Hard Rock Digital. Since then, the company has exited a host of other international markets in Europe and Africa, leaving it heavily exposed to the UK market.
888 embarked on a new chapter in 2024 with a rebrand to evoke but was unable to shake off its retail woes and slipped to a loss of £143.2 million by the middle of the year, as revenue growth in its traditional online casino business was offset by lower online and retail sports betting revenue in the UK.
By the end of 2024, retail revenue was down 5.4 per cent against solid online growth and by the mid-point of 2025, retail revenue was down a further 2.4 per cent year-on-year, driven by “challenging conditions on the high street”.
evoke had 1,302 William Hill shops at the end of June, representing a 2.2 per cent reduction on June 2024, with the reduction attributed to the impact of inflationary cost increases which made certain shops no longer commercially viable.
evoke’s retail segment had revenue of £121.7 million in the third quarter of 2025, a rise of 6.2 per cent year-on-year which included betting revenue of £67.1 million (+6.3 per cent), as the segment benefited from an improved margin to offset a 9.5 per cent fall in retail stakes.
At the time of the Q3 results announcement in October, evoke’s shares were trading at 43.30 pence per share. Then came the UK Budget announcement in November, which sent the company’s shares down 18.32 per cent to 30.55 pence per share.
The company estimated that the tax rises in the Budget would cost it approximately £125-135 million on an annualised basis once fully implemented in April 2027 and warned of shop closures and thousands of redundancies.
Evoke’s shares have since fallen to a low of 20.95 pence per share before jumping by 14.19 per cent yesterday to close at 24.95 per share, giving the company a market cap of £98.36 million.
The surge in the value of the company’s shares followed the announcement that Morgan Stanley and Rothschild & Co have been appointed as joint financial advisers in connection with the company’s strategic review.
The strategic review will explore “a range of potential alternatives to maximise shareholder value, including, but not limited to a potential sale of the Group, or some of the Company’s assets and/or business units”.
November’s Budget may have forced the company’s hand but the damage began years earlier. 888’s decade-long infatuation with William Hill and FOMO regarding M&A activity now looks likely to result in the demise of one of the oldest and greatest online gaming companies, confirming the old adage ‘be careful what you wish for’.
Shares in evoke plc. (LSE:EVOK) were dipping again Thursday morning, down 1.29 per cent at 24.63 pence per share.