Profit drops but jobs safe at Paddy Power owner – boss

The boss of the company behind Paddy Power and Betfair has said he does not plan to close any betting shops or cut staff in the UK as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Flutter Entertainment chief executive Peter Jackson said that bookies and their employees are safe, even though profit fell during the first six months of 2020.

“We’ve been clear since the start of Covid that we didn’t take money from Government support schemes,” he told reporters on a call on Thursday morning.

“We had already communicated that retail colleagues would be entitled to full pay … we don’t need to see any job losses as a result of Covid.”

The business did not tap into the Government’s furlough scheme which would have let it claim 80% of its employees’ pay back from the Treasury.

It came despite a 70% drop in pre-tax profit to £24 million in the first half of the financial year.

Revenue jumped 49% to £1.52 billion as the company integrated its approximately £10 billion acquisition of The Stars Group.

The second half of the year has been “encouraging” so far as football returned to the sporting calendar, but Flutter pointed out that the outlook for the business is still “highly uncertain”.

It decided not to pay a dividend to shareholders.

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs since the coronavirus pandemic started in March.

According to the most up-to-date Office for National Statistics data, around 730,000 people are out of work during Covid-19.

The crisis has hit brick-and-mortar retailers especially hard; however, Flutter has been able to lean on its online operations while the high street stores were shut down.

Its shares opened up around 1% as trading started in London.