Evoke has agreed to be taken over by Greek casino and lottery operator Bally’s Intralot in a £243m all-stock deal, ending two months of talks over a business battered by tax changes and a collapsing share price. The owner of William Hill and the 888 online casino brand will be valued at 52p a share, a 77% premium to its average price over the quarter to 17 April.
The deal lands at a moment when Evoke has been under pressure from every side. The UK government lifted remote gaming duty from 21% to 40% in November, with the higher rate taking effect in April, and a separate duty on online sports bets is set to rise from 15% to 25% in April 2027, apart from horse racing. Evoke said those changes created a material shift in the UK operating environment and would create meaningful dislocation across the competitive landscape.
For William Hill, the takeover marks another turn in a story that has moved fast since Evoke paid £2.2bn four years ago for the chain’s 1,400 high street bookmakers. The company’s share price has fallen by 90% since that purchase, leaving it with net debt of about £1.8bn and a market value of just over £180m. The numbers explain why a clean cash bid was never the answer here. An all-stock offer gave both sides a way through a market that had made Evoke far harder to value on its own.
Mark Summerfield, Evoke’s chair, said the board had been focused on maximising value for shareholders in light of the duty increases and the constraints of the group’s existing capital structure. That constraint sits at the center of the deal: Evoke is agreeing to be absorbed even as its own leadership argues the tax shock has changed the economics of the business. In December, the company brought in Morgan Stanley and Rothschild to review strategic options, a process that has now produced what Summerfield called the most attractive and deliverable outcome for shareholders.
The human stake in the transaction is clearer than the balance-sheet language suggests. The Shaked family remains Evoke’s largest shareholder with a 19.2% stake, and Avi Shaked said he founded the business 30 years ago in 1997. He said he had envisioned building a company that would stand among the world’s leading gaming businesses and that the family, as committed minority shareholders in the combined group, looked forward to staying involved for years. His comments give the takeover a sense of continuity even as ownership shifts to a larger platform.
Bally’s Intralot is not buying a blank slate. Intralot provides technology for 12 state lotteries in the US and has operations across Europe, South America, north Africa, south-east Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Soo Kim said the company was confident the deal would deliver substantial benefits for both sets of shareholders. The promise is that scale and international reach can offset the pressure now bearing down on Evoke’s UK business, where the company last month said it would close about 200 William Hill betting shops from May.
What remains unresolved is the practical path from agreement to completion. The takeover still needs the ownership and regulatory steps that come with a cross-border deal of this size, and Evoke shareholders will be asked to back a transaction that values the group far below the price paid for William Hill’s shop network. For now, the board has chosen certainty over waiting for a market that has already done most of the damage.
