Betex in £7m AIM move

Online football betting specialist Betex, now raising £3 million on OFEX, plans to join AIM to attract another £7 million of investment and has already appointed broker Numis to assist.

Betex, which recently won a £5 million contract to co-manage the state sports lottery of the Chinese province of Guizhou, is currently raising £3 million at 22p. The company is understood to have first explored the possibility of raising a subsequent £7 million on OFEX, but has since decided AIM would be more appropriate, considering the scale of funding required.

Betex, run by Cambridge psychiatry graduate-turned financier Dr Johnny Hon, wants the money to fund its Guizhou deal and help it make further inroads into China’s £12.3 billion lottery market. Provincial lotteries are the People’s Republic’s only legal form of gambling.

This contract ensures Betex’s local subsidiary will receive a management fee of ‘not less than two per cent’ of the lottery’s turnover up to 2009. If by then this arrangement has not yielded Betex a 300 per cent return on the £1.6 million it is committed to invest in the project, the agreement will be extended until it has.

Betex, which raised £1 million at 17p before joining OFEX in May, is asking subscribers to its current £3 million funding to pay 22p a share. If it moves to AIM as planned, the next £7 million funding is set to take place in November and no price has yet been fixed.

Leslie Copeland

Leslie Copeland

Leslie was made Editor for Growth Company Investor magazine in 2000, then headed up the launch of Business XL magazine, and then became Editorial Director in 2007 for the online and print publication portfolio...

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