John Boyle looking for opportunities to set up betting shops in Britain ‘within five years’.Bookmakers have to wait a day longer than everybody else for Christmas. However, it is often worth the wait. On St Stephen’s Day there were three race meetings in Ireland, with Leopardstown topping the bill.
The racing continues today and through the weekend, alongside English Premiership football, world championship darts and a range of other sports to snap punters out of their post-Christmas torpor.
While many of them use technology to bet, plenty more will escape domestic bliss for a few hours and head for their local bookie shop. If they do, the odds are short enough that it will be a Boylesports.
The group has 192 shops around the country and is one of the top three players here, alongside Paddy Power and Ladbrokes. The chain’s founder, owner and chief executive, John Boyle, says its turnover, that is the value of all the bets staked with the company, has reached €1 billion a year. The money flows through all of its channels, the shops, website, mobile app and telephone lines.
Boyle established the business in the teeth of one recession in the 1980s. If the official figures are to be believed, it has just seen off its second, through which it has actually developed the business. Its most recent acquisition, Tom Flood Bookmakers Ltd, brought it to its current number of outlets. That figure was 100 at the end of 2006, so it has come close to doubling since then. It added around 50 stores in the last three years.
The numbers have doubled as well. In 2006, turnover was just over €500 million a year. Acquisitions have driven much of the growth. As rivals found the going too tough, Boylesports moved in and took over. It bought shops vacated by British operator William Hill, which pulled out of the market here, and Celtic, previously owned by broadcaster and former government minister Ivan Yates, a victim of the recession.
Opportunity
“What appeared for us was opportunity,” Boyle says of the recession, “and if you want to know is there going to be the same opportunity in the next five years – definitely. We could easily manage 250 stores in Ireland, because there are lots of areas that we are not in.” He calculates that it could easily fit another 30 to 40 in Dublin alone.
Boyle’s ambitions are not going to stop there. His company has set its sights on entering the British market. It already has internet and mobile customers there, but he is now talking about bricks and mortar.
“We’ve looked in the past, the time that the Tote wanted to sell, that’s going back to 2006, 2007. We were showing interest then in buying their stores,” he recalls, “but then the recession arrived and the British government, who owned them, they took them off the market, because they were only going to get half the value.
“At that time we were very keen and I had spent a good few months over there in preparation for that,” he says. “So if the right acquisition knocked on our door, we’re looking for opportunities over there, so we expect in the next five years to have a presence in retail.
“You don’t know what opportunities are going to knock on your door. There’s three, four, different companies that could become available over the next number of years, and if you can show that you are good at retail in Ireland, you can do it anywhere in the world.”
source : www.irishtimes.com
