Bet365 chief Denise Coates’s salary rises to £221mn
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Bet365 chief Denise Coates earned close to £300mn last year in pay and dividends from the UK-based gambling group, cementing her position as one of the world’s best-paid executives.
Coates was paid about £221mn in the year ending March 2023, according to accounts filed at Companies House on Monday, an increase on her salary of £213mn last year. She also took at least half of the £100mn the company paid out in dividends, given her stake as the founder of Bet365.
This year’s payout comes despite the group falling to a pre-tax loss of £72.6mn, from a profit of close to £50mn in 2022, as it expanded in regions such as North America.
The group is also the majority owner of Stoke City Football Club, which reported an annual loss of £12.4mn, albeit an improvement on the £26.3mn loss the year before.
Coates is one of the wealthiest businesspeople in the UK, having earned more than £1bn in pay and dividends over the past few years.
Her pay at the family-owned company dwarfs the remuneration offered by listed FTSE 100 groups, where Pascal Soriot, boss of pharma group AstraZeneca, was the highest paid executive in 2022 with annual earnings of about £15mn.
Coates also narrowly trumps the best-paid executives in the US S&P 500, where Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman earned $253mn last year (he separately received about $1bn in dividends) and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai was paid $226mn in total remuneration.
Coates, who founded the company in Stoke-on-Trent more than two decades ago and kept the business in the area, is one of the UK’s highest taxpayers. Bet365 also donated £100mn to the Denise Coates Foundation, a registered charity.
Coates’s salary peaked at £421mn in 2020, but dropped to £250mn in 2021 and then to £213mn in 2022. This means that she has earned £1.1bn through her annual salary alone in just four years. The group, which is more than 50 per cent owned by Coates, also paid out £100mn in dividends in 2023 and 2022, £97.5mn in 2021 and £95mn in 2020.
The group on Monday said revenues rose to £3.4bn in the year to March 2023, up from £2.9bn the year before, with the majority from sports betting. The increase reflected the expansion into new markets, with a launch of operations in the US and Canada in 2022, but this also led to a “significant increase in costs”, the group said.
More than 20 US states have now legalised online sports betting, offering the world’s largest gambling companies a new and fast-growing market to target.
In the UK, higher-rate taxpayers need to pay close to 40 per cent on dividend income and 45 per cent on their salaries.
Paul Leyland, an analyst at Regulus Partners, described Coates’s rate of tax as “eye watering” but added that the Bet365 boss probably saw paying the high rates on her salary and dividend income as “the right thing to do” given her close links to the community in the midlands and north of England.
He added that being one of the biggest payers of personal tax in the UK also had a political advantage for the company in the tone of its discussions with the UK government and regulator in a heavily scrutinised industry. This could give Bet365 a voice denied to offshore operators when discussing the regulatory landscape, he said.
Leyland warned costs were likely to continue to increase faster than revenue from now on, exacerbated by growing its US business.
“Whether or not Bet365 deploys its balance sheet for regenerative M&A or continues to be a reliable but less threatening cash machine for its owners then becomes a very big question for the gambling industry as a whole.”
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