William Hill shares dive 11% on profit alert

(Close): William Hill shares shut down more than 11% after the bookie alerted on profits.

It said online trading had actually been hit by harder policy and "the worst Cheltenham leads to recent history".

It now expects full-year operating profit to be between ₤ 260m and ₤ 280m, below ₤ 291.4 m last year. As an outcome, the FTSE 250 business saw its shares drop nearly 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 ended up 6% despite reporting a 20% drop in full-year earnings to ₤ 512m.

However, when restructuring costs were removed out, underlying profits were a better-than-expected ₤ 686m.

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

It stated it had actually seen "an acceleration in the variety of time-outs and automated self-exclusions over current weeks", procedures which enable punters to stop betting with a bookmaker.

William Hill said that while the trend was "still progressing, we approximate that, must these trends continue around present levels, the following lower earnings will lower online's revenues by ₤ 20-25m in 2016".

Secondly, its revenue margins were lower than expected since of European football outcomes and recently's Cheltenham horseracing festival, where bookies were struck by big a variety of favourites winning races.

William Hill said that regardless of its online issues, the more comprehensive group continued "to trade well" and was in line with expectations.

The company also said it was in "sophisticated conversations" to purchase Openbet, a video gaming software application firm.

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 seller had actually issued a declaration stating that it expected full-year underlying earnings to be "at or around the bottom" of a formerly approximated variety. The statement was provided following comments that creator Mike Ashley made to the Times paper on Tuesday.

On the currency markets, the pound remained weak after having actually fallen sharply on Tuesday in the wake of the horror attacks in Brussels, which were seen as increasing the probability of the UK ballot to leave the EU.

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