 "Denise Coates’ is the founder of the world’s largest online gambling platform, named Bet365. Reuters")
Denise Coates, the co-founder of the Bet365 betting empire, is currently one of the richest women in the United Kingdom.
This is despite a 45 per cent salary cut.
She received Rs 1,500 crore (~150 million pounds) in salary and dividends last year.
The billionaire has earned a fortune thanks to her online gambling company, which has grown huge over the years.
Here’s all we know about her.
Who is Denise Coates?
Denise Coates set up the world’s largest online gambling platform, Bet365, in a portable building in the Staffordshire city in 2000, as per The Guardian.
The 57-year-old, who describes herself as the ‘ultimate gambler’, has consistently ranked among Britain’s highest-paid executives.
Much of Coates’ success can be attributed to her bold decision in 2000 to mortgage her father’s betting shops in order to start an online business with her brother, John Coates, who is now the co-chief executive.
Her total wealth has exceeded Rs 20,000 crore ($2 billion) in the last seven years.
She earned a record-breaking Rs 4,960 crore during COVID-19 in 2020 when online gambling increased significantly.
Apart from this, the Coates family also controls Stoke City Football Club. Its stadium is named after Bet365.
With a combined net worth of around 7.5 billion pounds, her family ranked 20th on the Sunday Times Rich List from the previous year.
She’s far richer than several other global CEOs
In 2024, Coates earned a salary of Rs 1,500 crore (150 million pounds) from her company.
Records filed by Bet365 for the fiscal year (FY) that concluded in March 2024 show that Coates was given Rs 950 crore by the business. She received half of the Rs 1,100 crore dividend in addition to her salary.
According to Fortune, her brother John also received a portion of the 110 million pounds (Rs 1,175 crore) dividend payment.
Her daily income, when calculated daily, exceeds Rs 4 crore.
However, compared to her 2023 earnings of Rs 2,885 crore (270 million pounds), the salary represents a substantial drop. The business attributed its recovery from last year’s losses to lower CEO compensation. Executive compensation for all three CEOs—including her father, Peter—was reduced from Rs 3,249 crore (304 million pounds) to Rs 1,325 crore (124 million pounds).
As equities markets strengthened, the Stoke-based company claimed a rise in turnover from Rs 36,307 crore (3.4 billion pounds) to Rs 40,000 crore (3.7 billion pounds) last year. It also announced cost reductions and a one-time gain on the value of its investments.
Even with last year’s steep decline in revenues, Coates’ compensation is still significantly more than that of many CEOs across the world.
As an example, Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, received $63.2 million (~Rs 5.42 crore) in 2023, which is only one-third of Coates’ entire compensation from the previous year.
In contrast, Jensen Huang, who served as CEO of Nvidia and oversaw a notable increase in the chipmaker’s market value, earned a relatively modest $34.2 million (£27.3 million) during the fiscal year 2024.
As per Fortune, Cook and Huang also possess shares in their businesses, but they are not as easily engaged as Coates’ in her private, family-run business.
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Her controversies
Coates and her company Bet365 are not unknown to controversies.
In 2020, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (Labour Party) received a donation of Rs 25 lakh from Coates’ father, Peter Coates.
In political circles, this sparked serious concerns about the party and its platform.
The business was also fined Rs 5.82 crore in 2023 for failing to prevent possible money laundering and for failing to ensure consumer safety.
Campaign groups have also taken notice of Coates’s extravagant annual salary, and they are dissatisfied with her payout in light of the cost of living problem.
Coates’s 2023 salary of £270 million drew harsh criticism from the think tank The High Pay Centre.
The group wrote last year, “Nobody becomes a multimillionaire in isolation from wider society."
“In this case, the wealth depends on money coming out of gamblers’ pockets, the efforts of thousands of staff, plus wider factors like people having some disposable income, a secure and reliable internet network or all the infrastructure that goes into staging sports events.”
It added, “There really is no moral or economic justification for such extreme payouts and the inequality and division that they create.”
With inputs from agencies