Big shot of the week
KENNY ALEXANDER, 49 CHIEF EXECUTIVE, GVC
Successful poker play is all about the element of surprise. As any rheumy-eyed card sharp will tell you, the most dangerous hand at the table is the one nobody sees coming.
Kenny Alexander’s rise to the top of the gaming industry has been so stealthy some of his competitors are still scratching their heads wondering where on earth he surfaced from.
In gambling terms, he’s the 50/1 outsider who’s sneaked up on the rails to win by a nose. The roulette ball that’s plopped on to zero at the last second. The royal flush which appeared out of nowhere.
In his ten years in charge of GVC, he has turned a company valued at £26m, which employed just seven people, into a global gaming giant with 3,000 workers, a market cap of £5.5bn and a coveted place in the FTSE 100.
HAVING started out owning just one online casino for German speakers, his firm now controls High street bookmakers ladbrokes coral, plus, thanks to its £1.4bn takeover of Bwin Party, big name websites such as Party Poker and Gala Bingo.
should you have stumbled in after last orders yesterday evening and had an online flutter, chances are it was one of Alexander’s firms taking your money.
Kenny may have earned a reputation for ruthlessness, but he doesn’t look like a gambling kingpin. He dresses modestly and his manner is quiet and unassuming.
To the croupiers in edgware Road’s Grosvenor casino, where he likes to work the tables, he’s just an ordinary punter. Other than making deals, racehorses are his main passion. Aged 13, Kenny’s civil servant father took him to Ayr races where he developed his liking for a bet. Growing up in Irvine, in Ayrshire, you might say there was little else for a young boy to do with his time other than follow Kilmarnock football club, which he still does to this day.
Given his knack for studying the form, it was perhaps inevitable Alexander would go on to study accounting at Glasgow university. He took a job in 1991 with city beancounters Grant Thornton, where he remained for six years before moving back to Ayrshire to be financial controller at a meat packing firm run by Hazlewood food.
like any punter, a copy of the Racing Post was rarely far from his side. Thumbing through the form guides one day, he noticed a job advertisement for betting firm sportingbet, which was looking for a finance director in Alderney.
Alexander leapt at the chance to work in an industry in which he was already well schooled.
Being a start-up, life was tough going. long, 16-hour days. By then he’d also met his wife caroline, who didn’t make the move to the channel Islands, so Alexander would fly home every other weekend. During this period he toyed with the idea of becoming a professional gambler.
Mrs A swiftly put the kibosh on those plans.
After several years, Alexander had risen to become head of sportingbet’s european operations. In 2007 he was named chief executive of GVC.
The gambling industry at this time was going through a period of flux. Punters were deserting traditional betting shops for the privacy and convenience of online gambling. legislation was closing markets in some corners of the globe while opening up others. There was the permanent threat of punitive taxes. All the talk was about consolidation.
But while rivals sat on their hands, Alexander set about aggressively hoovering up companies. In 2009 he acquired Brazilian firm Betboo. He snapped up old employer sportingbet in 2012 in a joint venture with William Hill. four years later he snatched Bwin Party from under the noses of 888 Holdings. In March he pulled off the ladbrokes coral deal.
Home is west london during the week and he returns to caroline and their two daughters at the weekend. He earned £18m last year, the third-highest remuneration package in the FTSE 100.
The man that many in the industry didn’t take seriously has cleaned up big time.