William Hill shares dive 11% on profit alert

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

It stated online trading had been struck by tougher guideline and "the worst Cheltenham results in current history".

It now expects full-year operating profit to be in between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, below ₤ 291.4 m in 2015. As an outcome, the FTSE 250 company 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 revenues to ₤ 512m.

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

William Hill said there were two primary factors behind the weaker-than-expected performance from its online organization.

It stated it had seen "a velocity in the variety of time-outs and automated self-exclusions over current weeks", procedures which allow punters to halt gambling with a bookie.

William Hill stated that while the trend was "still progressing, we estimate that, must these patterns continue around current levels, the following lower revenues will decrease online's earnings by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".

Secondly, its earnings margins were lower than anticipated due to the fact that of European football outcomes and last week's Cheltenham horseracing festival, where bookmakers were struck by large a variety of favourites winning races.

William Hill stated that regardless of its online problems, the wider group continued "to trade well" and remained in line with expectations.

The business also said it was in "innovative 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 declaration saying that it expected full-year hidden revenues to be "at or around the bottom" of a previously estimated variety. The statement was released following remarks that creator Mike Ashley made to the Times newspaper on Tuesday.

On the currency markets, the pound stayed weak after having fallen sharply on Tuesday in the wake of the horror attacks in Brussels, which were seen as increasing the possibility of the UK voting to leave the yohaig code EU.

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