32Red casinos

32Red Limited Information

Who are 32Red Limited?

We can’t imagine that there are very many people who come to this page without, at the very least, a working idea of who or what 32Red Limited is. It’s the company behind 32Red and 32Red Sport, which are two of the biggest iGaming sites in their respective fields in the UK. There actually used to be more branded iGaming sites carrying the 32Red name, including 32Red Bingo and 32Red Poker. We’ll get into what happened to them a little later on in this article, but for now, let’s focus on 32Red Limited as an entity. Think of them as the power behind the throne of the 32Red brand – but don’t imagine that they have total control over the brand’s destiny. That, too, is a thought we’ll be coming back to later.

As a standalone company, 32Red Limited probably isn’t as big as you imagine it to be. Wikipedia believes the business, which is based in Gibraltar, employs around 110 people. We have no reason to suspect that number is incorrect, so we’ll go with it. As famous for its various sports sponsorships as it is for its sports betting platform and its casino, 32Red has been around since 2002 but has become an especially prominent operator in recent years thanks to its long-running series of television commercials starring the comedian Leigh Francis as his alter-ego, Keith Lemon. Aside from being a company with a high profile, 32Red Limited is a company with a mission.

32Red’s Mission Statement

The official 32Red Limited website is a little scant on details regarding the company’s history, which is a little surprising, but perhaps that’s because it prefers to focus on the present. Rather than telling customers and potential business partners about how it got from where it started to where it is now, 32Red Limited is more interested in telling them about its philosophy. The “32Red Mission” is more like a series of pledges which can be found on the “About Us” page of its website. We’ll take them one at a time.

The first mission statement or promise that 32Red Limited makes is that it will always bring its players the best casino games. The exact wording of the promise says that players have access to more than five hundred great casino, slots and poker games, which actually contradicts the figure on the 32Red Casino homepage, where it’s given as over one thousand. Perhaps it’s been a while since anyone updated the mission statement. 32Red Limited also promises that its players have “the best chance to win” when they play at this casino and further says that it “likes it” when its players win. One would presume that this means 32Red Limited has ensured that its RTP rates are favourable to players, but the mission statement stops short of directly saying so.

Promising “super fast payouts,” which is another 32Red Limited mission statement, is the sort of thing that’s always music to the ears of players. We agree with the sentiment expressed in the statement that there’s nothing worse than hanging around for a week or more waiting for a casino to pay you. Unfortunately, 32Red Limited doesn’t specifically commit to a turnaround time beyond saying that the payments team is “always on hand,” which isn’t the same thing as saying that you’ll get your money on the same day that you’ve asked for it. The final two promises are “total confidence” and “total transparency” which, while admirable, are the sorts of qualities that players ought to be able to take for granted at a top iGaming site rather than forming part of a mission statement.

32Red Limited as a Sponsor

If all or part of your iGaming enterprise involves sports betting, the fastest and easiest way to get your name out there among sports fans is to sponsor a prominent team or sporting event. It’s also the most expensive way of getting your name out there, but that’s the nature of the game. 32Red Limited has never been afraid of stumping up cash and sponsoring big names, so you’ll doubtless have seen its name and logo splashed across a football shirt or event banner before now.

The most recent of 32Red Limited’s high-profile football sponsorships has been the shirt of Glasgow Rangers, although the brand also currently sponsors Derby County in England. Past football sponsorships have included the shirts of Aston Villa, Swansea City, Middlesbrough, Preston North End, and (strangely) Crawley Town. Football shirt sponsorships are about to become a thing of the past for gambling companies, so this avenue won’t be available for 32Red in years to come, but nobody can accuse the company of not making the best of it while the opportunity was there.

While football appears to have received the bulk of 32Red’s marketing kitty when it comes to sponsorships, the brand has involved itself in other sports in the past. It’s an authorised betting partner of British Racing and is also the name sponsor of the Haydock Spirit Cup and Kempton Park Racecourse.

Celebrity Connections

If you asked the average person in the street what they associated the 32Red brand name with (other than gambling), the words “Keith Lemon” would probably come out of their mouths. The comedian certainly isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but he’s been the official 32Red Limited brand ambassador since 2021 and has appeared in numerous TV commercials for the brand. He also appears in print and web commercials, and his face can be seen all over the current version of the 32Red Casino website. He’s a big name in the UK, but he’s not the only famous name who’s associated with 32Red.

When you’re playing at 32Red Casino with the sound turned on, you might occasionally hear a famous name or two making announcements, congratulating you on your wins, or commiserating you on your losses. That famous voice might be Patsy Kensit, who was hired to become the “official voice” of 32Red several years ago. She’s since been joined by TV presenters Ant & Dec, who perform a similar role. You can debate whether or not celebrity endorsements ought to make a difference to the fortunes of an online casino, but there’s no debating that they’ve done so for 32Red.

Joining The Kindred Group

32Red has spent most of its existence as a standalone iGaming company and would probably still be doing just fine as a standalone iGaming company if it was still one today. During the 2010s, the company found out that once you start buying out your rivals, you might find that one of your rivals turns around and buys you. In 2014, 32Red Limited bought GoWildCasino plus its entire customer database in what was its first major acquisition. A year later, it paid £8.4m to acquire Roxy Palace Casino, only to later close it down and redirect all of its customers to 32Red Casino. The board of 32Red Limited confirmed in 2016 that it was still considering further acquisitions, but in July 2017, it was 32Red Limited that found itself selling up.

For a reported price of £175.6m, The Kindred Group acquired 97% of 32Red Limited’s shares, thus gaining full control of the company. Becoming part of The Kindred Group meant that 32Red Limited found itself under the same umbrella as Unibet, Bingo.com, Maria Casino, Otto Kasino, and several other casinos which operate on the European mainland but not within the United Kingdom. You’ll recall that at the start of this article, we said there used to be more 32Red Limited brands and websites. It was becoming a Kindred Group property which led to the closure of these brands. 32Red Bingo was shut down because The Kindred Group didn’t want it to compete with Unibet Bingo, and 32Red Poker was relegated to the status of being a minisite within the main 32Red website rather than having a website of its own.

Since joining The Kindred Group, 32Red Limited has continued to grow. Keith Lemon was never involved with the company before The Kindred Group took the helm, so its profile has been boosted by the acquisition. It means 32Red isn’t in full control of its own destiny anymore, though, and it remains to be seen what will happen to the brand if The Kindred Group eventually acquires a bigger, shinier new toy.

32Red Limited and the UKGC

Even though it belongs to The Kindred Group now, 32Red Limited still retains a degree of independence in the eyes of the UK Gambling Commission, by which we mean it holds its own licence rather than relying on the one that Unibet holds (Unibet is the flagship brand of The Kindred Group). 32Red Limited’s current UK Gambling Commission licence was issued in November 2014 and is held under account number 3943.

Unfortunately, 32Red Limited made mainstream news headlines for all the wrong reasons in January 2023 when it was handed a financial penalty by the regulator. The fine came after the UKGC undertook a periodic licence review and found that the operator had broken licence conditions regarding customer interaction, social responsibility, and anti-money laundering measures. A formal warning has been pinned to 32Red Limited’s licence, and the operator was required to pay £4.2m. At the time, the UK Gambling Commission noted that 32Red Limited had fully cooperated with it throughout the investigation and that corrective steps had already been taken by the company. Had that not been the case, the amount of the fine might have been even higher.