The company, whose shares have tanked since last year's £13-a-share float, showed signs of improvement yesterday as it unveiled a maiden 3.2p interim dividend and confirmed the earlier than expected exit of chief executive David Yu, who is stepping down at the year end.
He is handing over on an interim basis to finance director Stephen Morana, who will hold the reins until August's arrival of Breon Corcoran from rival Paddy Power.
"Once that appointment was made I became a lame duck. It's better to have clarity," said Mr Yu, who will still have his £515,000-a-year contract paid up to October next year.
Asked if he should not have waived that given the performance of the shares, Mr Yu said: "We have a contract in place. We will respect that."
He has already been criticised for the 125pc rise in his total pay last year to £824,676, though that was boosted by a short-term incentive plan.
Mr Yu is bowing out after a half in which core betting exchange revenues reached £170m, boosted by second-quarter growth of 12pc. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation rose 36pc to £42.4m, with pre-tax profits up from £7.45m to £20.9m – though last time's were hit by £14.7m of exceptional charges, mainly due to the float. The third quarter has started well with core revenues up 13pc.
Betfair is increasing its fixed-odds betting to compete with bookies that can offer instant in-play bets on such things as the outcome of a penalty. "The exchange is always going to be the vast majority of the business but we accept there are some things it can't do," Mr Yu said.
Mr Morana said Betfair punters were currently going to rivals for 30pc of their bets: "We need to give them no reason to go anywhere else." Betfair is testing a faster website that can download pages in 3 seconds compared to 18. Mr Yu said this had "not been driven" by recent site outages, punters failing to get on bets for the Tote jackpot or a cyber theft of customers' account details. "Betfair is more than 10 years old. When we built the system, we didn't envisage all these products," he said. The shares fell 17.5 to 795.5p.
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