Questor: this gaming firm has reinvented itself but investors haven’t noticed

“Brutal commercial logic” and not just a wish to do the right thing is forcing gambling companies to reinvent themselves as leisure businesses and turn their backs on their previous existence as facilitators, in many minds at least, of addictive and destructive behaviour. This is the view of one fund manager who has put some of his clients’ money into Entain, the FTSE 100 gaming firm known until last week as GVC and the owner since 2018 of Ladbrokes. Entain has put serious sums into showing that it intends to stamp out problem gambling and make gaming a solely pleasurable experience for its customers, said James Thorne, a UK fund manager at Columbia Threadneedle. “The firm has arguably the best gaming technology in the world,” he said. “Its algorithms to detect problem gambling and assess affordability go beyond anything the regulators demand.” He said Entain included social yardsticks among its measures of its own performance and had put £100m into supporting grass-roots sport – a significant sum even for a FTSE 100 company.