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2007 revenue: £185,933,000

2007 group revenue: £181,928,000

2007 gross profit: £143,207,000

2007 EBITDA: £31,968,000

2007 profit: £19,388,000

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I am delighted to be able to report on another year of strong performance for your company. Like-for-like revenue, excluding our joint venture in Australia, grew by 30% to £182 million and the business continues to be extremely profitable and cash-generative. We remain firmly on track to deliver all of the key components of the 3-year plan that we outlined to shareholders a year ago.

As foreshadowed at our shareholder presentations over the past 12 months, the last financial year represented a year of heavy investment for Betfair. This investment has seen us establish very strong foundations for our business internationally, with core parts of our business now operating from both Australia and Malta, and with our customer base becoming increasingly international. In addition, this investment has enabled us to broaden our product range with the addition of new products like Multiples and Casino.

The nature of investment at Betfair means that we often bear the whole cost of an investment in a single year, while the benefits from that will continue to flow for many years to come. Certainly, the very strong trading performance in the first few months of our current financial year is evidence of the benefit of this investment programme.

The last year has seen a number of well-publicised regulatory developments around the world, which allow Betfair to continue to differentiate itself positively from its competition. In the United Kingdom, the Gambling Act has finally come into force and we are very well-positioned to capitalise on the opportunities that will open up as a result. Elsewhere the regulatory situation is less complete. Betfair has a long-standing policy of operating only in countries where it is legal to do so. As a result, we have not been affected by the fallout from the United States. Our future plans are not in any way predicated on accessing any non-legal markets. However, we believe that new markets will open up and we continue to be best-placed to work with regulators around the world in the future.

The impressive progress of the company during the last year would not have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of everyone at Betfair. The most important part of my message, therefore, is to thank David Yu, his senior executive team, and all of their staff in the company, in all of our offices around the Chairmanworld, for their amazing hard work, dedication and professionalism throughout the year. Together they are continuing to build an outstanding company.

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[...] Substantial investment in system capacity means that we now process, on average, almost five million transactions per day and serve over four billion page impressions per week. This is more than all the European stock markets combined. [...]

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[...] Looking over the detail it seems that over the year Betfair grew revenue around 30%. Of course the vast majority of revenue is commissions paid by you and I. Last year we paid somewhere around £180m in commission to Betfair. If we make some very broad, probably inaccurate, assumptions and say commission was levied at an average of 3% that would mean that Betfair customers won somewhere in the region of £6b last year. Unfortunately that also meant others lost £6bn, but no doubt traders accounted for a fair amount of money shuffling around in those figures. These figures are a bit of a stab in the dark but give you some idea of the scale that Betfair has reached. [...]