rank closed three casinos last quarter and revenue went up 5%

morgan_c

morgan_c

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rank put their quarter out this morning. like for like net gaming revenue up 5% to £216.1m for the 3 months to 30 september. grosvenor up 6% on that measure, visits up 1%, spend per visit up 5%. machines revenue up 14%. they also closed swansea, reading central and sunderland during the same quarter
and harris spent the statement warning about machine games duty ahead of the budget. so the message is: venues are performing, we shut three of them, please don't tax us. you know i read trading statements for a living and this one is like doing two jobs at once
 
Those aren't in conflict, though I understand why it reads that way.

Like-for-like conventionally strips out closures. It compares the same venues against the same period last year, so on the usual basis the three they shut wouldn't be in the 5% at all. I haven't seen Rank spell out their basis of preparation, but if it follows the convention then "revenue up 5%" and "we closed three sites" are both true at once without anybody lying.

Reading Central had lost money in each of the last six years, £2.3m in total. Swansea posted a £73,000 operating loss for the year to 28 June with revenue £635,000 under budget. Those weren't healthy venues being culled for fun.

The part I'd actually question is the timing of the tax warning, not the numbers.
 
six years of losses and ppl in here acting sad about it lmao. its a building. nobody wants to drive to a building
 
Ah here. Everyone reads machine games duty and thinks casinos. It's the tax on the fruit machines, lads. I've two in the lounge and one in the back bar. Category C, which puts me on the 20% band same as half the pubs in the country. My accountant rang me about it before I'd seen a word of it anywhere, and that tells you how worried that crowd are. There's talk the hit lands on the big-money machines and leaves mine where they are. I've heard that song before a budget and then watched the thing come in sideways. If it moves on the 28th I find out the same morning Rank does, except there's nobody writing statements for me.
 
question for anyone who knows the grosvenor setup properly. ive got a G1 card from years back, barely use it
if you'd had money sitting in that account at sunderland when it shut, where does it go? its one account for the club and the website isn't it, so does it just sit there on the online side, or do you have to go and claim it off someone
couldn't find anything on it
 
It's one account, yes. The terms call it a joint website and in-club account - same balance, usable at either, one per person. In-club winnings have to be verified before you can use them online and that can take up to 24 hours.
What happens to a balance when the specific club you used shuts, the terms don't address at all as far as I can see. It's an account with Grosvenor rather than with the building, so logically it follows you. But logically isn't the same as written down.
 
I was in there most fridays for about elevenn years. Found out by email. Thats it, an email. Nobody has said one word about what happened to the staff on that floor and there's been six weeks of articles about the share price. Half of them had been there longer than me. Does anyone actually know what happened to them
 
ok but be real for a sec. the whole model is you get in a car, park, pay for the parking, walk past a guy checking your ID, sit at a table where someone sets the minimum, then drive home at whatever time they decide to shut. i can open stake on the toilet. the reason those three closed isn t tax its that its 2026
 
you've never set foot in one have you. "whatever time they decide to shut". they're not all the same place lad. aye and in ten years youll have never once stood in a room where someone else was happy about something. there's a shop two minutes from my door i've been going in since i was 18. fella behind the counter knows what im putting on before i say it. you cant get that off a toilet mate
 
grandad man. he's younger than i am. you've spent an hour telling folk who actually go to these places that these places are finished. you not see the problem there
 
timmy this whole thread is about a company that got fined because nobody in the building noticed a man lose fifty grand. that's the thing you keep calling the old way of doing it. well my bf went through a bad patch on his phone two years ago and not one person saw it. at least in a room there's a chance somebody looks up
 
lol oh now im personally responsible now for a casino not watching some guy. i didnt fine them did i, the regulator did
and dont aim ur bf at me as an argument. thats not data thats a story
 
Worth being accurate about what the Commission actually found, because it isn't only the £50,000 case that's being quoted around.

Three Rank entities settled - Grosvenor Casinos Limited, Grosvenor Casinos Limited and Gaming Group Limited. £5,012,261 to the Consolidated Fund, plus a third-party audit of how they implement their AML and social responsibility policies. Section 116 review, following a targeted compliance assessment in June 2025, covering a period across 2024 and 2025.

On the social responsibility side there are several cases set out. One customer lost around £50,000 with no interaction recorded. One lost about £200,000 across two visits. One was long-standing, won about £260,000 and then lost around £250,000 inside twelve days with no recorded protective interaction at all. Another recycled roughly £85,000 through a venue over about eleven weeks.

There's one more, and it's the one I'd point this thread at. That customer had already self-excluded, came back, and was allowed to lose £25,000 before anything started. The Commission also criticised repeated low-level interventions that were never assessed for whether they worked, and delays in escalating to deposit limits or restricting card payments.

The AML side is arguably worse. Their policies hadn't been updated for the 2020 changes to the Money Laundering Regulations, so customers who should have been classed higher-risk weren't. Managers were making discretionary calls with no clear guidance behind them. Enhanced due diligence was skipped in cases their own rules said required it.

Sue Young's line was that the risks "are equally alive in the land-based sector". That's aimed at every retail operator reading it, not just Rank.
 
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