888 UK casinos

888 UK Limited Information

Who are 888 UK Limited?

The short answer to this question is that 888 UK Limited is the UK arm of the 888 Group, which is one of the biggest gambling companies in the world. When we say “biggest gambling companies,” we’re not just talking about the iGaming scene; we’re also talking about the physical realm. 888 UK Limited owns William Hill, which gives the operator a brick-and-mortar presence that most of its rivals can only dream of. It’s an enormous company, and yet at the same time, it operates far fewer iGaming sites than it did a couple of years ago.

The numbers tell you a lot about what you need to know about the company. As of the time of writing, approximately 1350 people work for 888 Holdings (another name for the 888 Group) in offices all over the world, and the company enjoys revenue of over £1.2bn per year. It’s all a far cry from the humble beginnings of the operation in the late 1990s – which we’ll look at in more detail now.

The History of 888 UK Limited

For regulatory reasons, the current base of 888 UK Limited is considered to be Gibraltar. That isn’t where the business was founded, though. The 888 story begins in May 1997, when it was founded by Aaron and Avi Snaked under the name “Virtual Holdings Limited” in Antigua. It’s an unlikely space for a global empire to spawn from, but that’s what happened. The first casino site that ever launched on the Virtual Holdings Limited network was called Casino on Net, which was shortly followed by Pacific Poker and Reef Club Casino. Antigua presumably proved to be a rich source of inspiration for those second two sites.

When 888.com was first launched in 2005, it was just another casino site on the platform. It wasn’t until the following year that someone at Virtual Holdings Limited (which still exists as one of the companies under the 888 Holdings umbrella) realised that 888 might be a neat name for the whole network, and so the branding was officially changed in 2006. It might surprise some of our readers to hear that 888 has been around as a brand for less than twenty years, but it’s true.

To Buy or to be Bought?

Nobody would hesitate to describe 888 Holdings as an iGaming giant today, but the truth is that it nearly became an industry giant years earlier than it actually did. 888 was in talks about a merger with Ladbrokes as long ago as the end of 2006, but fears about any such deal being blocked by anti-competitive laws saw the two titans end their talks amicably without a deal being agreed. Ladbrokes would go on to merge with Coral several years later. 888, in the meantime, bought Globalcom Limited’s bingo platform for £40m in 2007. Bingo quickly became the centrepiece of the company’s operations, making £14m the year after the platform was acquired. Remember the importance of bingo; it’s going to be important later.

Having been denied the chance to secure a deal with Ladbrokes in 2006, 888 Holdings wasn’t to be denied the next time the chance to swallow a big name came along. However, it had to avoid being swallowed first. In 2015, William Hill made a bid of £750m for the company. Share prices jumped by nearly twenty per cent upon the announcement, and for a time, it seemed like the deal was destined to be done, but it fell through for reasons that never entirely became public. William Hill trying to buy 888 Holdings is something else you’re going to want to remember in a couple of paragraphs’ time.

Massive International Expansion

By the end of 2014, the 888 Group had a combined total of nearly eighteen million people registered across the multiple iGaming sites that it operated. It was big, but it was destined to become even bigger. The company’s headquarters had long since been moved to Armenia to Gibraltar, but in 2018, the company took another major international step by applying for a Malta Gaming Authority licence to go with the one that it already held with the UK Gambling Commission. At the time, it was reported that the company only took the step because it was unsure how the UK’s looming exit from the European Union would affect its licensing status elsewhere, but it turned out t be a hugely beneficial move in the long run.

A moment ago, we said you were going to want to remember that William Hill tried to buy 888 in 2015. Here’s why; in 2022, 888 Holdings confirmed that it had acquired all of the European operations of William Hill – including the company’s betting shops and UK-facing iGaming sites – for £1.95bn. The tables had well and truly turned – and the company wasn’t done making major moves yet.

Goodbye Bingo, Hello Sports

Here’s our second callback. Several paragraphs ago, we told you to remember the importance of bingo to 888’s operations during the company’s early years. In 2021, the company decided that it had reaped the best years out of its bingo department and elected to part with it. A package of more than two hundred UK-facing iGaming sites was put up for sale and ended up going under the hammer for £38m to Broadway Gaming Limited. Broadway, in turn, set up a new casino network company called Grand Battery Holdings Limited to manage the sites. To the surprise of many observers, the sale included signature 888 sites like 888 Bingo and 888 Ladies, which had been proven winners for the operator for many years.

Letting go of a whole segment of the company that had made so much money might have looked like an odd move to outsiders, but 888 had a plan. The company’s directors had made a conscious choice to shift away from bingo in order to clear space for and improve focus on its large and growing sports betting operations. 888 Sport had been steadily gaining in popularity for several years, but more importantly than that, the company launched its Sports Illustrated Sportsbook (run in partnership with the long-running Sports Illustrated magazine) in Virginia, USA, in May 2022. Another Sports Illustrated Sportsbook was set up in Colorado, and the company intends to expand further across the United States of America with sports betting as markets stateside continue to open up. Bingo is now firmly in the rearview mirror for the 888 Group, and even its casino operations appear to have taken a back seat for the foreseeable – in the future, it’s all going to be about sports betting.

888 UK Limited and the UKGC

888 UK Limited would never have been able to become as big as it is in the UK (or elsewhere) if it didn’t hold a full UK Gambling Commission licence. The current licence that it holds with the regulator is number 39028 and has been in force since November 2014. 888 UK Limited (or the 888 Group) is a company that’s used to making headlines, but it made a few headlines that it would rather have avoided in February 2022. That month, the UK Gambling Commission announced the results of a licence review that it had undertaken – and they didn’t make for pleasant reading.

After completing the review, the UKGC found that 888 UK Limited had breached paragraphs of its licence relating to preventing money laundering, correctly identifying customers, and interacting with customers in a socially responsible way. Additional conditions have been attached to the company’s licence since the review, which also saw 888 UK Limited handed a formal warning. More seriously than that, the company was fined £9.4m because of the breaches. At the time, it was one of the biggest penalties that the UK Gambling Commission had ever handed out. Had it not been for the fact that the operator cooperated with the regulator throughout the review process and took corrective steps immediately, the fine might have been even bigger.