Game plan: Per Widerström lays out his strategy to reinvigorate evoke

A mere dice-roll from the entrance of London’s Fenchurch Street station, a William Hill shop sits cheek by jowl with a poky smartphone repair shop and The Windsor public house. Adorned with the usual William Hill signage, the betting outlet’s narrow entrance is dwarfed by surrounding high-rise glass tower blocks and nearby 20 Fenchurch Street, the concave-shaped skyscraper nicknamed the ‘Walkie-Talkie’.

Yet any regular customer who stopped by this busy shop one chilly Thursday in mid-December last year would have been confronted by an unfamiliar – perhaps even incongruous – face behind the counter and anti-bandit screen. That individual wasn’t a new cashier but rather Per Widerström, CEO of William Hill parent company evoke (then 888 Holdings), who had taken up the post at the London-listed group just two months prior.

Kitted out in a company-issued William Hill polo shirt with its streaks of yellow and turquoise splashed across the collar, shoulders and sleeves, Widerström had volunteered to work a shift taking bets and paying out winnings alongside long-serving employees Richard Zampetta and Patricia Rogers. The live horseracing from Britain’s tracks that day for the punters to get their teeth into was jumps meetings from Warwick, Newcastle and Taunton, supported by an all-weather card at Chelmsford City.

“When a customer comes to the counter, you need to be there, you need to be timely, you need to be accurate – there is so much action going on,” Widerström explains to EGR more than two miles from the Fenchurch Place shop while seated in the dual-aspect boardroom at evoke’s UK HQ just off Tottenham Court Road. “Fortunately, I had some fantastic colleagues who were coaching and helping me during the day. It was a great experience and I have a few more days like that in my calendar.”

A shift spent stationed at the coalface in one of the bookmaker’s 1,300-strong network of shops, or licensed betting offices as they are formally known, was part of the new boss’ desire to gain hands-on experience of various facets of the group. After all, this is a diverse international business that comprises William Hill (online and retail), Mr Green and the 888 brands (888casino, 888sport and 888poker) and employs more than 11,000 people around the world.

However, it soon became evident from talking to colleagues that the group should have a new corporate identity. One that better unifies its brands. “One of the key messages was that we are not yet one company,” the 58-year-old CEO reflects. “We have great legacy brands but sometimes we were [known as] 888, sometimes William Hill, sometimes William Hill/888, so it was absolutely clear there was a need for us to become one company with the new corporate identity.” That new name, evoke plc, received an overwhelming thumbs up by shareholders at May’s AGM.

A new chapter

With nearly two decades of igaming experience under his belt, Widerström was hailed by chair Lord Mendelsohn as the board’s “clear standout choice among a number of high-calibre candidates” for the top job. The boss’ previous full-time management role was CEO at Prague-headquartered Fortuna Entertainment Group where, for seven-and-a-half years up until 2022, he turned the omnichannel operator into a Central and Eastern European powerhouse.

Even so, taking up the reins at 888 was something of a baptism of fire after a turbulent 2023 for the business that included the sudden exit of CEO Itai Pazner over compliance deficiencies involving VIP players in the Middle East, resulting in a £2.9m settlement with the regulator in Gibraltar, where the firm’s head office is situated. 

Then there was the record £19.2m William Hill was ordered to pay for historical social responsibility and anti-money laundering failures. These travails, along with profit warnings and takeover speculation last year, weighed down the already floundering share price. Hired as more than just a safe pair of hands to steady the ship, the new CEO has relished the challenge of reviving the company’s fortunes as he quickly set about formulating an ambitious 100-day plan encompassing day-to-day operational improvements alongside key strategic changes.

“Anyone that is taking on a new job is thinking, ‘What shall I achieve in the first 100 days?’” Widerström remarks after a sip of his coffee. “I was working quite intensively when it came to the 100-day plan and to calibrate with the chairman, Lord Mendelsohn, what success would look like.” In fact, he presented his strategy to the board before he officially started as CEO in October 2023 so “there was no doubt what was going to be the focus from day one”.

Although it wasn’t included in his original plan, it soon became apparent that additional cost savings would be needed. Widerström explains: “Doing the budget for 2024, it was clear that there was further need for cost optimisation, so I, together with my team, took the decision to [implement] a cost-optimisation programme with £30m in savings.”

As part of the plan, the management team has undergone quite the shakeup since the tail end of 2023 with the recruitment of experienced and highly capable talent. This included the arrival of Sean Wilkins from Bucharest-based Superbet to fill the vacant CFO role, ex-Flutter Entertainment UK and Ireland (UK&I) product director Ian Gallagher installed as chief product officer and former DraftKings exec Jeffrey Haas appointed chief growth officer.

Stephen Sheridan was hired as chief customer and operating officer, Mark Kemp arrived from DAZN Bet to take up the position of chief commercial officer and Rik Barker, in the past Flutter UK&I’s chief information officer, was named group chief information technology officer. Meanwhile, Fredrik Ekdahl was appointed group general counsel and Anne Sewell was brought in to take the chief people officer role vacated by Mark Skinner.

Along with chief strategy officer Vaughan Lewis and chief risk and intelligent automation officer Harinder Gill, both of whom were already in place before Widerström’s arrival, the revamped C-suite looks quite the formidable lineup.

“It’s important that I have a top-class executive team that truly know what good looks like – and have delivered what good looks like,” the Swede says, before adding: “Best effort is not good enough. When we are resetting this company, we need to aim for world class. I know that I now have a team that can deliver that […] the new team’s leadership will cascade through the rest of the organisation.”

Besides overhauling the team at the top, there has been a focus on improving evoke’s consumer-facing brands. “Having seen 888 and William Hill from the sidelines for many years, they were benchmarks for the sector, but in recent years that has not necessarily been the case,” says Widerström.

“While the company has some fantastic consumer brands and proprietary technology, great people and a strong position in some very important markets, the company hasn’t performed as well as it should.” He also underlines the need for William Hill, 888 and Mr Green to be “more distinct”.

“Number one, we need to improve when it comes to how we are building brand equity, so the story behind each of the consumer brands. That comes back to pricing, promotions, product and customer experience. Previously it has been, in some areas, rather erratic and inconsistent.”

At the group’s full-year 2023 earnings presentation, held on 26 March, Widerström said that despite having all the key ingredients for success, evoke hadn’t been performing well enough, or fulfilling its potential. Unveiling a value creation plan (VCP), he laid out six key strategic initiatives as part of a new strategy for success. The first of these addresses customer value propositions (CVP) and making the brands distinct and in tune with customer needs, as mentioned previously.

The second pillar is about evoke’s customer lifecycle management, which is “not necessarily cutting edge,” Widerström remarks. “It should be insights-driven, it should be automated. That means making sure we have one common customer experience platform driven by data and automation to make sure it’s the best and most optimal experience for the customers, and in a responsible way.”

Thirdly, it’s about having a winning organisation. As well as the new corporate identity, this includes “delayering” the business. “[We’ve had] too many layers, too few spending controls, so we need to be much more efficient and agile,” he notes. Then there is ESG, with an emphasis on responsible gaming and generating sustainable revenue.

The fifth aspect is around product and tech, including ensuring the resources pumped into these areas deliver value. And the last one is dubbed Operations 2.0. Because many functions are carried out manually, evoke is setting up from scratch an intelligent automation and business transformation division to future-proof the firm.

Evoke already deploys AI when it comes to casino game recommendation engines or customer service chatbots, but the CEO, who is a big proponent of the technology, insists that the business is striving to “institutionalise” AI. For instance, AI being able to provide infinite personalisation in a responsible way to serve the right product and offer to the right customer across any channel.

“We have world-class people coming in from other sectors to lead this effort,” Widerström reveals. “The mantra is that human intervention is the exception. It’s about intelligent automation, AI and data in order to support one of our key financial commitments, which is to expand our profit margin.”

As evoke’s CEO references, the VCP also comes attached with important medium-term financial targets, namely, achieving between 5% and 9% revenue growth per year and expanding adjusted margin by 100 basis points a year. It also includes deleveraging debt to below 3.5x EBITDA by the end of 2026 with the help of disciplined capital allocation.

On that last aim, the group was left saddled with considerable debt arising from the £1.95bn acquisition of William Hill in 2022. Rising interest rates made it harder to service that debt. As of 31 December 2023, net debt amounted to £1.72bn, equivalent to a debt to EBITDA ratio of 5.6x, down slightly from £1.73bn at the end of 2022.

“They are absolutely achievable,” Widerström insists when pressed on how realistic the financial targets are. “We, the new team, are the ones who put these targets in place on the back of the new strategy.”

Core values

Evoke has deliberately shifted away from dotcom markets (95% of 2023’s revenue was from locally regulated or taxed markets), which means the geographic split of the B2C offerings fall into two categories: ‘core’ and ‘optimise’ markets. The core markets – classed as the UK, Italy, Spain and Denmark – accounted for 85% of revenue in 2023 and are the focus for the group going forwards. This quartet is where evoke says it has a leading position or significant local scale achieving sustainable and profitable growth.

Meanwhile, optimise markets are those considered potential core markets in the future, providing they demonstrate a clear path to market-leading positions and that much-talked-about sustainable and profitable growth. Countries in this segment include Romania, Ireland, Canada, Germany and Sweden, though none of these markets contributed more than 2% of group revenue in 2023.

The company’s largest online market is the UK, where, spearheaded by flagship brands William Hill and 888casino, it accounted for 37% of the £1.71bn group revenue generated in 2023. Evoke pegs its UK market share at 10%, enough for a podium position. Yet the UK arm has been impacted financially by the implementation of safer gambling measures and changes in the customer mix amid evoke’s pivot to a recreational and more sustainable player base; total revenue for the UK&I Online segment fell 8% in 2023 on a pro forma basis to £658.5m.

As for Q1 2024, revenue slipped 1% year on year (YoY) to £164.4m. Sportsbook stakes for the first three months of the year tumbled 9% YoY, yet average monthly actives increased 9% to 1.27 million. “We have seen substantial growth when it comes to number of actives, but we see the ARPU [average revenue per user], or value of those active customers, is less than it was before,” Widerström acknowledges. “You could say there is a more sustainable customer base in the context of having more recreational customers.”

With William Hill being a legacy brand that has historically attracted high-staking customers compared to recreational-centric operators, the effects of affordability checks and other safer gambling measures have perhaps been more pronounced for this 90-year-old bookmaker.

Evoke is confident, though, that expanding its low-staking, casual player base is vital for a sustainable future and that UK&I revenue will return to YoY growth from Q2 onwards, fuelled by customer engagement, new product launches and the annualisation of safer gambling measures. 

“Regulation in the UK has had a significant impact,” says Widerström. “We support regulation and the white paper [to overhaul Britain’s gambling laws] and I think we are very well positioned when it comes to executing on the white paper. The company took proactive measures, in some cases earlier than some competitors, but that had a material impact on performance.”

These proactive measures include reducing the maximum stakes on online slots to £5-£10 and rolling out financial vulnerability checks to flag up if a customer is exhibiting specific negative financial markers of harm. From September, of course, all UK-licensed operators’ online slots will have a £5 cap, reduced to £2 for 18 to 24-year-olds,following the Gambling Commission’s consultation in which most respondents supported limits. “We support it, and our focus is now on how we can reduce the friction in the customer experience,” says Widerström.

With a trained eye on jurisdictions with market-leading positions, along with those with potential to follow suit, evoke has disposed of certain overseas assets deemed surplus to requirements. Last year, the locally licensed business in Latvia behind WilliamHill.lv and MrGreen.lv and which operated on a separate tech platform to the rest of the group, was bought by Paf in a deal worth up to £22m.

Then, in March of this year, evoke announced that following a strategic review of B2C operations in the US, selected B2C assets are to be sold in phases to tribal operator Hard Rock Digital. This sale will be combined with a “controlled exit” of evoke’s remaining B2C US operations by the end of 2024.

As well as freeing up tech and marketing resources, evoke anticipates the withdrawal to achieve a reoccurring annualised benefit to adjusted EBITDA of about £25m from 2025 onwards. However, it also expects to incur a net one-off cash cost of approximately £40m in relation to the exit, including a $25m brand licence termination fee to end its partnership with Authentic Brands Group (ABG), owner of Sports Illustrated (SI).

Despite SI Sportsbook and SI Casino being rolled out in Michigan and New Jersey, as well as SI Sportsbook in Colorado and Virginia, the brand – like similar deals of this nature between operators and sports media giants – only managed to grab a sliver of the ultra-competitive US market.

Evoke, which has also operated 888casino in New Jersey since the state’s igaming launch in 2013, pointed to significant direct costs of operating in the US, including taxes, market access and licence fees, as well as “intense competition from well-capitalised incumbent participants”.

Furthermore, US gross profit margin had been lower than that of the wider group. Widerström says it was a “swift and decisive” decision to abandon consumer-facing efforts Stateside. He continues: “When you have a strategy and a value creation plan that clearly outlines what to do and what not to do, it became clear that we shouldn’t do US B2C. So, from that perspective, it was an easy decision.

“But, of course, our colleagues had done tremendous work, including working with our Sports Illustrated brand partner, ABG. We did well in terms of building that consumer awareness.” 

While the US B2C journey is set to come to an end, is evoke considering entering any new markets, perhaps through M&A activity, or does the debt pile mean that acquisitions are off the table? The CEO responds: “When it comes to non-organic growth, we are not planning any transformational M&A activity whatsoever. But do we see opportunities to engage with high-impact, low-capital ventures like 888AFRICA? Absolutely.”

Evoke holds a 19.9% stake in 888AFRICA, a joint venture (JV) formed in 2022 that later that year used the 888 brand to launch 888bet with a hyper-localised offering in a handful of regulated African countries. Run by a team of experienced igaming professionals and with podium positions in most of its live markets, 888AFRICA last year acquired Kenya-based BetLion and its more than three million registered players. It means the JV’s footprint now covers Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, Kenya, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“888AFRICA is a great example of our agility and ability to leverage our assets and strong brands to create new growth opportunities in a capital-light way,” says Widerström. Evoke insists it is fully committed to the JV and has the option to increase its stake and ultimately own 100% of 888AFRICA in the future.

Staying power

Spending the best part of an hour in the company of evoke’s CEO, his enthusiasm and determination for the significant task of steering the group in the right direction is clear to see. As is a passion for the industry that stretches back to the mid-2000s.

Indeed, it is 18 years since Widerström first entered the world of online gambling as CEO and director of online bookmaker Expekt, where he spent the next four years before joining PartyGaming as COO. From there, he became chief integration officer and group games director at bwin.party in the wake of PartyGaming’s merger with bwin in 2011. Later that year, he made the switch to Gala Coral Group as MD of Gala Interactive and, three years later, took the top job at Fortuna Entertainment Group.

Widerström, who holds a Master’s degree in international accounting and finance from the London School of Economics, has also been chairman of Casumo and performed a non-executive role at affiliate Catena Media. So, evoke’s phlegmatic boss knows the online and retail gambling industry pretty much inside out – and what it takes to succeed. But what exactly is it that has kept him immersed in this space all these years?

“When this [job] came up with 888 Holdings, as it was at the time, I asked myself if I should go back into an operational role at my age – I have a few grey hairs,” he tells EGR almost nine months into the role. “It had to be a sector I really enjoy and find dynamic. Clearly, the betting and gaming sector is very dynamic, and I’ve enjoyed that over the years. It’s also rather complex as well in terms of regulatory technology.

“I’m not the sort of person who comes in and just administers a company. I like to see change, so this reset and transformation of evoke is something that really attracted me.” He concludes the conversation by saying: “Ultimately, it’s about seeing the William Hill, 888 and Mr Green brands get back to where they should be, at the top. It’s a privilege for me to have the opportunity to be back.”