Flutter Entertainment plc (FLUT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and good evening, and welcome to the Sportsbet Investor Day question and answer session with the Sportsbet leadership team joining us live from Melbourne. I will now hand over to your host, Barni Evans, Sportsbet's CEO, to begin. Barni, please go ahead.

Thanks, Sean. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. It's great to have you with us. Now firstly, I recognize today is a really busy day, given the breaking news overnight. So we appreciate you making the time. Thank you. I'm joined by the leadership team of Sportsbet, and those of you that have seen the video will know this, but for -- to do the formalities, I got to ramp my screen. I'll start with Ben Chan, who is our Chief Betting, Product and Data Officer; Tania Abbotto is Chief Customer, People and Sustainability Officer; Doug Brown, Chief Growth Officer; Nathan Arundell, CFO; and Simon Noonan, I've deliberately left for the last because it's his birthday today. He's our CTO. I'd welcome the most difficult, complex and intricate technology questions in the session, if that's possible, that would really make his day. Sorry, Simon. As I mentioned, hopefully, you've seen the video that's been available to you. If you haven't seen it yet, if you can find the time at the appropriate, I'd encourage you to take a look. It gives you quite a thorough inside look in -- on our strategy. It talks about the areas in which we seek to win in terms of product, value and our brand. It talks about the enablers behind the business that enabled those things to come to life, so our people and culture, our approach to responsible gambling and sustainability and obviously, technology, too. And it also gives a fair amount of detail on our relationship with Flutter and how we're leveraging our position within the Flutter family. So well worth a look if you can get to it and if you haven't done so already. Now I think we should probably get into it. We're keen to get as many questions from you today as possible and give you as much insight as we possibly can. Normal rules of engagement. We're here to talk about Sportsbet in the Australian market. So if you have inevitable questions about the rest of the Flutter Group or other jurisdictions, and I suspect America might be top of mind at the moment. Unfortunately, we won't deal with those. But as usual, the Investor Relations teams will take those off-line and deliver the usual feedback loop for you on those. And I think without further ado, then my job now is to hand back to Sean, who will introduce our first questioner.

So our first question today comes from Michael Mitchell from Davy. [Operator Instructions]

Three if I could, given group management and IR haven't set the number at 2 as they typically do. So I'll go for 3, if that's all right. And the first, Barni, on your structural revenue margin advantage. Just interested in how you think that compares to the online market average at present and maybe how your own win margin versus that market average has trended in recent years. Second of all, you made the point in the presentation a couple of times about how staking per active increases as the cohorts age, if you like. Is there any meaningful kind of change from either a product perspective or a marketing perspective that you think about in terms of being able to retain those customers as they become more valuable going forward? And then thirdly, just in terms of the current capacity of the tech platform, and I think you made the point very well in terms of how it's scaled higher to support what's been very strong growth. But just in terms of thinking about that going forward, is there any kind of significant investment we should think about in terms of your own kind of tech [off-line], if you like, in terms of supporting what looks to be a strong growth opportunity over the coming years?

Cool. Thanks, Michael. I was desperately scribbling those down. You're a faster talker than I am writer. So we'll deal with them one at a time, and we might seek clarification before we come back to the second and third. So structural margin advantage. So in that space, we're talking about really 2 things that we were talking about, both gross win, and we're talking about net revenue as well. And it's important that we deal with both of those at the same time in the same conversation because they're really 2 sides of the same coin. In that vein, I'll hand shortly to -- firstly, Ben Chan, who will talk about the gross win element and what I hope then you'll be able to do is talk about the drivers and the levers that you and the teams have available to you. You heard a lot from Raph Lewski and the global team, and that's one, but Ben will expand on that. But then really important that we follow quickly on with Doug, who'll talk about generosity and ultimately, then will convert through to net revenue because, as you heard from Nathan at the beginning, whilst gross win revenues have increased over time, we've kept net revenue much more stable. So Doug I think will talk a bit about generosity, but then also hopefully, wrap up with what the overall value proposition is that we take to market through his marketing teams because that's really important, isn't it, less about what we see behind the scenes and more about what customers see, feel and experience. So is that all right on your first question, if we approach it in that way?

Great.

Great. I'll kick off by talking about gross win margin, as Barni mentioned. And gross win margin is really driven from our side by 4 things. And I discussed this in my presentation, I believe, on Slide 27. And those 4 things are: number one, customer mix, right? We're currently continuing to grow our recreational customer base. Number two, our product mix. Through our innovation of products that customers love, this is a big driver. Number three, pricing accuracy. Through our proprietary pricing models that we own, we've talked through in our presentation how that generates value for us. And then lastly, our sophisticated risk tooling that we operate 24/7. And we're constantly improving all of these drivers, and it helps us keep that flywheel going, creating the means to invest further into product development, generosity and marketing. And I might hand over to Doug to talk about generosity and marketing.

Thanks, Ben. Thanks for the question, Michael. I think and I hopefully would have come through quite clearly in the presentation, our approach to generosity has changed significantly over the last few years. So I think when we layer in generosity post gross win, we're thinking about a few things but the broad of generosity mechanics we have means we can actually put generosity in front of customers that suits their unique needs at a cohort level. And that's the benefit of scale and the sophistication and broad range of generosity mechanics. The second thing is personalizing then gives us the ability to manage those sustainable net revenue margins, especially to our most loyal customers. It's really important that we use generosity to help manage sustainable net revenue margins. Personalized generosity allocation lets us do that very efficiently, but also sustainably for customers. And then finally, which sort of might segue into Simon later on, is just this point around our technology platforms. Doing what we do, which is a broad range, above the line, below the line, sophisticated. To have the technology to be able to do that in an automated, scalable fashion but have the confidence to know that are always going to get a great experience, that is genuinely leveraging a scale advantage. That's a complex system that takes great investment. So combining those all together brings together a brilliant generosity experience, but does the job of also managing sustainable net revenue margins. And then sort of touching on what Barni was saying, it's the combined element of we've got an exceptional product range, we've got an exceptional generosity machine and capability, but then overlay that on a healthy brand, reaching mass audiences across different channels, being able to communicate those. It's a really effective formula. And we think it's a formula our customers love, and it's incredibly difficult to replicate.

Thanks, Doug. Thanks, Ben. So Michael, on your second question, as I understood it, it was talking about the really great penetration we have in the younger adult population. And your question was, what is it that we need to do to be able to sustain those so that we still got them as they approach their financial maturity? Was it -- did I get that right?

Yes, exactly and specifically with relation to product and marketing in terms of your approach there as the cohort of the business changes [indiscernible].

Cool. Yes. No. Well, I think the starting point is recognizing that just because we have them now, we don't get to keep them by rights, and we're going to keep working really hard at retaining and reengaging them. One thing that's true about as you go younger down in the age spectrum, customers become more fickle, they're less set in their ways. So you have to work harder to retain a younger customer than you do an older customer. And you sort of answered the question for yourself there. It really goes to how you approach product and how you approach marketing, how you approach brand, got to keep innovating. When you heard Tania speak on the video, you heard her talk about us being a purpose-led and very culturally aligned company. The number one value in our business is customer first and last. We're customer obsessed. So we have to keep understanding them, which means we would have the right levels of insight, the right levels of engagement to understand how their needs are changing. And if you do all that well, then what gets spit out the other end of the spectrum is really great product that keeps engaging them. A great example for that would be you're probably sick of hearing us talk about Same Game Multi. But over the last couple of years, we've transposed that into racing and talked about same race multi, and that's attracting a much younger demograph to the racing product than would typically be the case because we're using sort of sports metaphors to apply to a more mature product set. Our younger customers are loving that, particularly in greyhounds, funny enough. So that's going really well. That's just one example, though. Doug or Ben, there anything that you would add to that in terms of innovations that you -- you're sort of passionate about that would keep these customers coming back?

Yes, absolutely. You mentioned Same Game Multi, I think another great innovation that we've seen and you would see in the presentation is Bet With Mates. And it's just an outstanding product that really does attract the younger customer base as well. That makes the customer experience just even more enjoyable, taps into the social network phenomenon, makes sports even more exciting for our customers, and customers just absolutely love it. You would have seen from the quotes on the right-hand side of Slide 26, it's just another way that we continue to innovate. And as Barni mentioned, we're really customer obsessed, customer first and last is our number one value, and we treat it that way. And that closeness delivers the insight that we then innovate for our customers.

Maybe one thing I'd add is we've spoken about innovation in certainly products, and we've touched on generosity, but I think innovating how we reach customers at scale. So great content, that's original. It's unique. It's in channels that's contextually relevant that engages and then reconnects customers back into our brand and our platform. I think the work that the proven track record, especially in the last few years around digital and social, examples like Snapchat. Being able to dominate share of engagements is a really important metric that says that our brand is healthy, and we're engaging customers in a way that brings them back and, to that point that Barni made, is winning them back in every betting occasion that they choose us as innovating how we reach customers is really important to us.

And then the final thing I'd say is not to listen to has-been CMOs like me who think that they know what this audience want and actually go straight to the audience and listen to them. That's probably to watch out. But these guys keep me honest on that, I'd say. And then your final one was about technology and whether you should expect any significant investment in that space over time. I might answer that or ask Simon to answer that question a bit more broadly. As you probably know we don't provide sort of divisional CapEx guidelines, so we won't talk to that. And if we did, we'd start a pre-budget negotiation between Simon and Nathan. So we'll avoid that at all costs. But Simon you might talk to the constant need to resource the scale to meet customer needs, but I think also probably talking about the opportunity within the Flutter Group as well as a useful angle for Michael here.

Yes. Certainly. Michael, really great question. And I think the way I think about scale for the Sportsbet business is we've got this mantra around speed needs and speed needs for the customer and underpinning that spend needs is the scale of our platforms. And over the last 2 years, we've moved all our platforms to cloud, and that essentially enables us to auto scale with the demands of the customer. It gives us greater resilience so that when we do have some issues, we can auto heal. And from an availability point of view, we've got the highest availability infrastructure in place now with AWS. So I think with those 3 components, it gives us great scale and being in the cloud also allows us to innovate. And it's a really important ingredient as we think about how do we support Sportsbet but deliver those great customer experiences. And then moving to what Barni alluded to around Flutter and Flutter technology. Well, Sportsbet works really closely with our colleagues in the Flutter technology group, and we're always collaborating around how do we collectively think about scaling our platforms. And one classic example is our pricing and risk management platforms. We've got people from across the globe thinking about how do we innovate in this space but also scale it because our goal is to cut the price once but deliver it to all destinations. And we've been able to do that over the last 2 years, and it was in the presentation I mentioned around pricing, risk management. And we've got now a repeatable platform for sports models and for auto trading. And by enabling that, we give our prices to the various brands across the group, and that allows us to have scale, different purpose platforms but also accurate pricing, which is automated and for me, that's why I think about scale, but I always think about it from a customer lens. And from a team point of view, I can say, our engineers, they are always focusing on performance, volume because they are the things that matter because if our platforms is not up, our customers can interact.

Our next question today comes from Ed Young from Morgan Stanley. [Operator Instructions]

The first one, you mentioned about becoming more recreational, so some pretty clear KPIs you gave around gross win margin being one of those factors in the presentation. But if I look at revenue per AMP, it's about double in Australia what it is versus, say, U.K. and Ireland or international, it's even above the U.S. How do you think about recreational? Do you think you have a recreational base or do you have a base of becoming more recreational? You must discuss that within the group. So how do you think about that sort of issue or that sort of theme going forward? The second one is a tech-side question. You invited it. So I think it's only fair to ask one, but a very clear journey there away from third-parties towards in-house. I think that was a very clear side in terms of where you're going. I just wondered if you could describe what it is in the sports that can account -- that is still third-party? And is that something that will also go in-house over time? Or is it sort of a small, low-value, low-ROI part of the food chain to actually, by the way, changes you -- basically you control everything you need? Or is that further gains to be made there perhaps? And then third one is sort of a relative question. So very clear about the overall marketing and generosity spend increasing. So that message is well received. But the marketing efficiency, as you said, is now very high at, what, 12% of revenue. Elsewhere in the rest of the group, it's been raised international. It sits at much higher levels in Europe. So I appreciate your [indiscernible] Australia perspective, I get that. But do you think it's replicable across the rest of the group to do something similar? Or are there structural reasons around where you can put marketing in terms of the media assets? Or are there any other kind of reasons why marketing might sit structurally lower in Australia, given how you're approaching the market?

Cool. Great. So on the recreational customer base and the revenue per AMP, I'll handle that, Ed. On the tech stack, I'll hand back to Simon as well who will delight in regaling you with his views on that. And then marketing and generosity, we'll speak Doug as the practitioner and then Nathan as the owner of the purse strings because between the 2 of them, they'll get you the answer that you need. On the revenue per Amp, we spend a lot of time talking about this across the group, and there's a lot of reasons why direct comparisons from country to country are really difficult. GDP per capita, for example, just one, and I'm sure you would list out a much longer list. For me, it's actually relatively straightforward in Australia. And that's just Aussies love sport. Like there is just such an ingrained culture of appreciation of sport. And as an Englishman coming to this country 10 years ago, I thought, they won't be more passionate about sport than we Londoners were or are. But geez, it's -- the Aussies take it to a new level. And of course, that translates into just a sort of cultural affinity for betting, which I haven't seen elsewhere. So that would be my answer to that question. On the tech stack, Si, do you want to talk about the sort of the direction of travel there?

Yes, certainly, Barni. And thank you, Ed. Look, from our point of view, what's really important to Sportsbet is the customer experience. Getting that right, owning it, owning the tech stack, owning the knowledge. And I think we've progressively done that, as you saw in the presentation today, and we'll continue to do that. I think by owning personalization in generosity, the risk platforms, the trading platforms, the pricing platforms and our front-end channels, that really lends us control and being in control of our own destiny. It also then allows us to innovate and innovate very rapidly and create some really terrific products. Ben mentioned in the presentation things like Bet With Mates and Same Game Multi a couple of times. Those products are a byproduct of us owning passes tech stack we do today. And I think that will continue, and we'll progressively look at other items to the build-out as well.

sorry, can I perhaps just follow up on that one while we're on the subject? Understood there's a direction, and I think the innovation sort of side of it's clear in terms of how you've built that. But what is it that's not in-house? I imagine there must be some live provision stuff in Sportsbook. That was my guess there. But in the account, for instance, what are you reliant on, on third parties? And again, is it something that's meaningful? Is it blocking you from doing innovation you'd otherwise like to do? Or is it small vision, the big scheme of things right now?

Yes, I think what we look at is, we make decisions on what parts of tech stack make commercial sense. There's no limitations today. And I think that's the great thing. And as I mentioned to Michael before, the fact that we've been able to take all parts of our stack to the cloud is a great example of that.

Thanks, Si. So on your marketing ratios, Ed, I'll hand over to Doug and Nate. I think it's worth pointing out that revenue has grown faster than we expected it to over the period, which obviously pushed that percentage down a bit. So there's a bit of a false positive there. And Doug, I think, we'll talk about considering the totality of both marketing and generosity because you have to consider them together. But then Nate, you might just talk about how we think about that from a financial planning point of view. That's a really long-winded way of saying it that we won't come back to answer your final question about what you can expect elsewhere in the group: a, that's not my job; and b, I don't think that's something that we would guide on even if we could. But I think you'll find good insight on what the guys have to say.

Thanks, Barni, and thanks, Ed. And again, I want to comment on the specifics, as Barni mentioned. But Ed, the first point I'll make is, as you can imagine, we absolutely switch sort of the performance of CPA and how that correlates lifetime value. So we look at that very, very closely. And I think our track record of acquiring customers in the Australian market, hopefully, that would have come through really strongly in the presentation. And that gives us -- the scale advantage we now have is those investments are also engaging and driving momentum of more than 2 million customers. So we get that benefit and also serves to help reactivate customers. So we're getting a number of investments from scale -- sorry, advantages from scale. I think the other point I'd make to Barni's point is that we've got a very strong generosity position and the combined formula where our brand is healthy, we've got great partnerships that enable us to reach through things like broadcast partnership with media and sporting and racing partners. On top of that, we're also investing in technology, which enables us to reach efficiently and put great content in front of customers in the right context. So marketing is in good health. Our generosity, as we said, we're a broad ranged, highly personalized, which drives efficiency. And again, investing in technology, which gives us the confidence of a great experience, combined with being great product. That whole formula, we think, is a really winning formula. And again, customers are loving it, and it's very difficult to replicate. So I think looking at a totality -- in totality gives you a good sense around how we're thinking about it.

Thanks, Doug. Ed, look, thanks for your question. I'll just quickly round off by saying that Barni is quite right, where our revenue has grown substantially over the last 18 months. So some of those cost efficiencies, they are sort of flattering. But we have -- and hopefully, this comes throughout the presentation, we really do focus on return on investment right across the P&L, not just marketing. But to take Doug's point, we don't look at that marketing percentage in isolation. We look at marketing and generosity together, and we move budgets between the 2 when we need to. But it's worth saying that it's really not ascertained to get ratio. Like we're not setting a marketing ratio and then forgetting about it. We remain really focused on growing the business. And if we find opportunities to invest in marketing to engage with a broader customer -- new set of customers, we absolutely will take that opportunity. So that probably hopefully gives a little bit of color on the marketing ratio.

Our next question today comes from -- sorry, our next question today comes from Gavin Kelleher from Goodbody. [Operator Instructions]

Just a few questions for me. Just on the market opportunity that you've laid out in the presentation this morning. Obviously, you've given your percentage market share. I think it was 42% of the Australian betting market. Is there a idea of the size of the market you can go for? What I mean by that is, is there a cohort of the Australian betting market that's VIP or very high-value customers that you just will never go near given your kind of increased recreational focus? That's my first question on the market opportunity. And the second thing as well I picked up in the presentation was your view that you can take share from the wider gambling market in Australia, i.e. lotteries, casinos and other forms of gambling. What gives you that confidence that sports betting is doing that? Is it a COVID-related issue? Or is there new products you'll introduce? I know there's regulatory kind of restrictions on you doing any gaming products. But how are you confident that you can continue to kind of take share from the overall gambling market? That's on the market opportunity. And then just a follow-on question on regulation. It's been quite negative for the last few years, regulatory change in Australia. And is there anything on the potential positive front, i.e., live betting coming in and online or maybe someday in the long-term future when you could see poker or other products? And then I have one more follow-on question, but those 2 to start.

I made that 3 for the record, but if that's possible, we'll give you that. And so on the -- let's walk backwards through those. On the reg change, we'll -- I'll call on Tania to talk about -- I want to qualify the use of the word negative there because we actually think good regulatory evolution is a positive for a maturing market. So we might talk a little bit about that. In addition to answering your question, I'll work through the other 2, though. And then guys, just chip in if you want to add anything. On the market opportunity, is there any cohort that we wouldn't go for? We're a mass market brand, so we don't play in the super, super VIP space. But what we've observed over the last 18 months is even cohorts that we thought might be quite resistant to a dynamic young brand like Sportsbet actually are really open-minded. And what I'm talking about there are the retail customers. These are customers that have known about Sportsbet for many, many years but chosen not to come on board. It took the closure of a retail outlet to capitalize their behavior, and the evidence is that they are loving the product, and we know that objectively through surveys that we take, we observe their behavior and anecdotally, from a customer service point of view in Tania's teams. Midway through last year, Tania's teams were overrun with retail customers coming online for the first time and not being that au fait with basically commerce the younger cohorts have, but they've got used to it now, and they're really loving it. So what that tells me is that the brand can stretch to many, many parts of the market, young and old, racing and sport, highly studied versus more casual. Now we're especially strong in the recreational space, but that doesn't mean we don't penetrate the others, too. So I'm pretty bullish about that with the exception of that super VIP area that is not really part of our DNA. Before I move on, does that give you enough answer on that part of your question?

How big is the super VIP market, any idea? Is it 5%? Is it 10% of possible?

It's really difficult to measure, but it's not -- if it was really meaningful, then we'd have found a way to get to it. So it's also really volatile as well, as you know. On the wider gambling market, and what gives us the hope or the expectation that we can penetrate beyond that, first thing I'd say is the stepping or penetrating that wider gambling market is not the only source of growth that we see. There are others. But to answer your question directly, what makes us think we can take sports betting beyond the 17% that it penetrates all the share that it takes at the moment? I think the answer lies in sport. And like with most markets in which we operate, sport is the dominant facet of young adult culture. People navigate their weekly routines around sport, they wake up thinking about support, they go to bed thinking about sport, and they talk about it pretty much with all of their discretionary time in between. And what we're doing is making sport more interesting and more engaging. With -- let's think about the 25-year old whose father might have really engaged with a club or a team. But this 25-year old cares more about the players in the team and really wants -- doesn't want to bet on that team winning, but wants to bet on that player scoring the first basket in a game. And we're keeping those through the player props that are enabled by the data coming out of Ben's team, platforms coming out of Simon's team and the data capabilities that we have part of the group. We get to reinvent new forms of betting that appeal to those sports fans. And that takes me back to Nathan's funnel that we talked about. 15 million sports fans, of which 10 million pay to cite their passion for sport, of which only 6.8 million bet, of which only 2.1 million bet with us in the last 12 months. Now I've sort of side-tracked your question. But the 2 worlds overlap between that gambling world and the 15 million population who are sports fans. So a long-winded way of saying, I think we've got an absolute right to play in that space, and the way we get in is through sport and through innovating the consumption of sports experience.

Perfect. That helps.

Great. So let's finish up on your regulation question. And the -- and we will come to you -- in fact, let me get rid of the positive side of it to begin with. We don't anticipate, in the short term, any positive change to regulation. So we don't anticipate any liberalization of any form of gambling in Australia that's currently prohibited. And we're fine with that. We're really bullish about everything else that we have to do and the opportunities ahead of us. But I want to pick up on the -- what you talked about as the negative regulation there. And if I'm really honest, we don't think of it as negative. We welcome good regulation. If it raises the bar in terms of customer protection and if it broadens the bus and makes customer protection more consistent across all operators in the market, then we welcome it. With that in mind, we've got a really good track record of: a, acting unilaterally ahead of regulatory requirements, just because it's the right thing to do; or b, working with regulators and advocating for the right type of legislation that makes customers safer. With that in mind, Tania, do you want to just give a couple of examples to Gavin as to how we've been working in that space?

Yes, sure thing. And look, I echo everything that you've said, Barni, both in terms of product expansion, in terms of our perspectives on the consumer protection environment that we're in and the benefits of that. I think that's absolutely the case. I think the way that, that plays out for us in terms of examples in the way that we have both supported and advocated for regulation and change is in the example that Nathan shared in the deck around the National Consumer Protection Framework and then, more recently, with respect to credit card bands, and we think that they're really positive steps that will create industry standards that means that we're delivering really advanced consumer protection measures. I'm pleased with that, very proud of it. I think then to go one step further to Barni's point about the areas where actually, we're not waiting for regulatory change, but rather setting the standards and hope that our peers across the industry will follow and get -- and come with us 2 examples right back to 2016 when we introduced our take rate toolkit. But then as recently as the take a sec before you bet campaign and the investment that we've made there, again, entirely voluntary that we think sets the standard for the industry and move us forward in a really sustainable way.

Thanks. So okay, Gavin, I think you have one more in the end.

Yes. No, I just wanted to ask about how do you incentivize Sportsbet employees to collaborate with the wider group. We can see it throughout the presentation the risk and trading collaboration that's happening. We can see it in product as well. But how do you -- on a kind of an employee level, how do you incentivize people to work and collaborate in something that may be outside their own kind of P&L responsibility?

That's a great question. Tania, I'll have a crack, and then you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think it's interesting that you talk about incentivization on the back of the previous question because I'm not sure if you picked up in the video, we're now incentivizing all staff in Sportsbet to drive our responsible gambling practice higher. So that's a form of using incentives to drive behavior. Our senior people do have a component of remuneration based on global outcomes. It's funny, I was having this conversation with Peter last night. We -- the way Sportsbet people behave, and I think this is broadly -- not broadly, this is true that Flutter people in general is they don't need a lot of sort of carrot or stick to do the right thing for the group because as a bunch, we're pretty passionate about being part of something bigger. And the case in point I was talking about with Peter last night, and I won't talk about the project because it's commercially sensitive, but there were product and tech and data people between FanDuel and Sportsbet and the decision that they got to without any sort of senior management needing to intervene was, well, as we make this decision, as we allocate resource, we need to think about it from a Flutter point of view. And the product that we're talking about here might be really important for one jurisdiction. But globally, it could be super important if we look at it through a different lens. And that I guarantee you that no one in that room, no one in that conversation thought about their bonus or their rem structure as they engage in the conversation about what was right for Flutter and what was right for our customers. Tania, I've rambled on a bit there. Is there anything you'd add to this?

No, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, you will have seen in the people part of the presentation that I spoke quite a lot about alignment and the power of alignment in Sportsbet for motivating our team towards a common set of goals and how powerful that is. That exists across the Flutter Group. The alignment around the key ambitions of the group for our expansion into new territories, for new products, for innovation is something that really does unify our people. And I think that, that has been a real motivator and continues to be for people to say, I'm ambitious and excited to be involved in programs that will move the group forward beyond the parts that Barni talked about with respect to incentives.

Yes. That's a really good point.

Our next question today comes from Richard Stuber from Numis. [Operator Instructions]

I think quite a few have been already asked, but just a couple for me, please. The first one, obviously, the improvement in gross win margin has been very impressive. I was wondering sort of how relevant is a change in product because of it? And what I mean by that is any sort of indication in terms of the relative growth in [Audio Gap] racing? And has this mix now matured? And the second question is, do you have any sort of idea of the size of the offshore market or sort of the unregulated offshore market? And how is it -- and how this has changed over, say, the last sort of 5 years? And I know you mentioned in response to Gavin's questions about no change of -- in liberalization on the near-term horizon regarding sort of in play -- online In-Play Betting or online gaming. But are you seeing any sort of regulatory changes potentially on the land-based sector, in particular, things like pokies, which may help you increase that 17% market share in sports betting?

Thanks, Richard. Okay. So on improvement in gross win margin, we've got Ben. And Ben, you can talk about the drivers there and cover off the sport versus racing angle that Richard specifically talked about. On the unregulated market, we might turn to Nathan just briefly on that. It's not something that is particularly topical within the market at the moment. But Nathan will just cover that off briefly. And on the regulatory change in terms of the opportunity from negative regulation on land based, I'll answer that quickly. So the other guys can crack on to theirs. Not really is the simple answer to your question there. We're not looking at that as something that is about to happen or should happen in any period of time. And to be quite frank, we're fine with that because we're planning to be getting on with the market that we're operating in. So we're pretty focused still. So Ben, you okay to talk about the gross win side?

Absolutely. Thanks, Richard, for the question. Gross win margin, as I mentioned earlier, it's really driven by those 4 drivers, and I'll touch upon your racing and sport question. 4 drivers being customer mix, product mix, pricing accuracy and sophisticated risk tooling. And each of these drivers, we're just continuing to push forward, which is feeding that flavor that I've mentioned both today and in the earlier presentation. Regarding the racing and sport mix, what I won't do is disclose the mix and where it's headed, but we've had really strong growth, as Barni has mentioned, in the sport mix as different customers are attracted to the various parts of our game. And so -- and it's just overall a very healthy growth in the mix profile. Obviously, we've -- with the influx of retail punters over the last 12 months, we've -- they over-indexed quite significantly on the racing side, so that's awesome. And it's great because obviously racing has slightly higher margin. It makes forecasting in the future pretty difficult, right, because until we know precisely what proportion of that cohort we retain. We're pretty bullish. They seem to be sticky customers. They're enjoying the product, as I talked about. But until we get 12, 18 months down the line and we go through a period of proper post-COVID normal, we're not going to be able to predict with any great accuracy as to what racing does within the business on the back of those retail customers.

Richard, I think we're okay to give you sort of -- some sort of feel and estimate of our racing sport mix. And some of the trends that we were seeing pre-COVID have sort of obviously turned around because of racing being the only thing on in town in the last 18 months for a good period to that time and sort of 3 quarters of our '19, '20 turnover was on racing simply because there was no -- not as much sport during that -- good chunks of those -- of that period. But prior to that, obviously, the trends were going the other way.

Nathan, while you have the mic, do you want to talk about unregulated markets?

Yes. So on unregulated markets, from what we know and from what the government surveys, et cetera, tell us, there hasn't been a great deal of change over the last few years. There's probably 2 things to talk about there is, firstly, there's a difference, there's the online illegal offshore wagering market, and there's also the illegal offshore gambling market. So the offshore wagering market, we believe, is very small and really doesn't impact us that much because of our recreational customer base. The online gambling market, which has other forms of gambling which are not allowable in Australia, things like gaming, et cetera, that is bigger, but it hasn't changed dramatically, we don't think, in the recent years. The Australian communications authority are continuing to try and crack down on that and prohibit Australians from playing those forms of gambling. It's really difficult. They're doing a great job, and we're fully supportive of them. That's probably the best answer I can give there.

Our next question today comes from Simon Davies from Deutsche Bank. [Operator Instructions]

Perfect. Just 2 from me, please. Firstly, you talked a bit about your responsible gaming initiatives. Can you provide us with some broader context behind that? So I don't know how you measure this, but what percentage of Australian adults are showing signs of problem gambling? And what are the trends you're seeing in the broader Australian market? And do you now think that your responsible gaming tools and controls are as robust as those at the Flutter Group in Europe? And the second question was just whether you can provide any color around Q3 trading and the trends that you're seeing most significantly, is there any evidence of a recovery in retail? And what percentage of that previous retail revenue number do you think has permanently shifted to online?

Okay. Thanks, Simon. I -- Nathan, I will come to you because you know what we're allowed to talk about in terms of Q3 and not. So you can be the rule master on Simon's second question. On your first one, we'll come to Tania and talk about the differences or similarities between Sportsbet and other parts of Flutter and where we are in our journey, I think to cut to the chase. We think we're doing a good job, but we can always do more. But Tania, do you want to pick up the lead on that one?

Sure. So I might start by answering your question, Simon, sort of backwards in terms of where we are today from a Sportsbet perspective and where we feel we're going. So you will have heard me say in the presentation that we think this space is an area of perpetual responsibility, and that means that we don't think we're done. We know that this is an area that will continue to evolve from an evidence perspective. We understand that we'll continue to learn more. But we do have a strong strategy in place, that 4-point strategy that I shared, and we think that, that sets very strong foundations for the direction of travel for us. It allows us to both understand the needs of our customers deploy our innovative technology and data and also raise awareness and think about how our customers enjoy our products safely. With that in mind then, we are continuing to leverage the different initiatives that are being deployed across the Flutter Group to understand how we might bring them to bear and learn from the best practices that exist. The markets are different. Clearly, the characteristics of those markets are different. What we do have across the Flutter Group is a genuine commitment to our customers, the safe enjoyment of our products and making sure that we continue to advance our safer gambling practices. So we use that as a key opportunity. And so whilst that might play out somewhat differently across the different divisions, one of the things that we are very proud of is that we're able to take those learnings and continue to evolve the strategy that I shared with respect to Sportsbet. And that's something that we do very actively. One of the things that helps inform how the market is moving some of the percentages and trends are our partnerships with external bodies. We work, for example, with the University of New South Wales to fuel their research and support them as they understand what intervention practices and communication protocols work best within the Australian context, how different demographics might respond and also how we might use data and different data insights to continue to deliver best practice safer gambling. So both leveraging Flutter, leveraging our external partnerships with research bodies and also the commitments across the Sportsbet organization, we're able to continue to advance it. That is...

Do you have any data in terms of the extent of problem gambling in Australia?

The -- I don't have it to hand. And I think that certainly, there are percentages that would indicate that up to 10% of customers who participate in the category may experience some form of gambling harm across the gambling harm continuum, and that's very important to note. So that is something that we do have regard for, but also regard for the fact that, that doesn't always look like customers experiencing the extreme harm but rather some forms of harm along that continuum.

We're a little bit cagey on that, to be honest, Simon, because you could pick any one of a number of a dozen research sources, and they would tell you a very, very different number for that. And none of them are objectively true and none of them objective untrue. There's a degree of vagary in how this is measured. But why don't we -- we'll -- let's come back to you off-line on that. We'll come back through the IR team. If there's some numbers that we can reliably use, we'll share those with you. I think the -- just to build on Tania's point, and you asked the question about what can -- are we up to the level of other parts of Flutter. I think a really important thing to recognize that as much as we talk about the power of being part of the Flutter family and being a great global organization where we can leverage the combined strengths. That doesn't mean we do everything the same everywhere. And we talk in the same breath about managing customers locally and making decisions close to customers. And what's right for a customer in Australia is not necessarily what's right for a customer in New Jersey or in Dublin or London or Prague. And therefore, that variety that you see in different approaches and different times across the group is really useful for us in terms of learning. I wouldn't expect just because we've run a $15 million advertising campaign urging customers to set deposit limits in Australia but immediately, that gets transposed into the U.S. market. We need to behave really appropriately according to stage of market evolution and the dynamics at any point in time. Nate, give us a little what you can on Q3 trading.

Yes. Look, I better not give you too much, Simon, otherwise, some people in Dublin might be listening. So I can't obviously say too much, and the Q3 update from the group will be out in early November. But I'll just give you a couple of snippets in regards to -- and I said this in the presentation. First of all, over the last 18 months, we've obviously benefited greatly from getting a disproportionate amount of those retail customers and increased engagement from our existing customer base. And you would have seen that in the first half of 2021, we actually had some really good retention rates and better-than-anticipated retention rates. And half 1 '21 was a period of when Australia operated under a more normal trading environment. For us, that seems well to go now that we're back locked down. But throughout that period, retail betting outlets were open, et cetera. So some really encouraging signs there. So I'm pretty happy with momentum on that. But I also did say in the presentation that even though we're looking forward to the Spring Carnival, we're looking forward to the footy finals like we do each year, we've got some really tough comparatives because, obviously, 2020 had a high concentration of those rescheduled sporting events. So like everyone around the world, Simon, we're waiting to see how consumers respond as we get out of this COVID mess and get into -- back into the real world. And then I think we'll have some much better -- we'll be able to get some much better trends.

But can you comment on the relationship with retail, i.e., are you still continuing to benefit and holding on to those retail customers that migrated across?

Yes. Look, I think what I'd say to that, Simon, is that those half 1 figures that we discussed in regards to really good retention, we were happy with the amount of retail customers that we retained throughout that period when retail betting shops were back open.

Our next question today comes from Kiranjot Grewal. [Operator Instructions]

Perfect. Sorry, I think my -- the video is not working, but I'll just continue like this. Just a couple of questions for me. You mentioned that you're doing better attracting recreation customers and is helping your margins. It seems like a lot of this is maybe being driven by land-based online shift. In this line, I mean, can you do anything to better control that land base to online shift journey? And would you consider any M&A within that? The second question is around Slide 61. That was incredibly helpful sort of outlining the spend by customer based on your acquisition. Just building on that, are you seeing any differences in betting spend or sales with newer cohorts versus older? And how are you positioned to deal with potential changes in demand? I've heard some of your peers sort of planning e-sports as a key opportunity. And is there also a key opportunity for you? And just the last one. What's sort of in your mind the biggest threat to derailing your progress that you've been making in Australia?

Great questions. So recreational customers and the -- or muted shift from land based to online and will we consider M&A. I'll handle that one. On the behaviors of new customers and changes in demand and you cited e-sports as an example there, I'll pass that to Ben and Doug. They can both talk about that in terms of -- Doug, in terms of where he's going in the market and the customers he's going after and Ben in terms of the product mix that engages a next generation of punters. And I think there'll be some quite rich insight we can give you there. And then the biggest threat, I'll deal with that quickly. I think the biggest threat to us is complacency. I think we have had a good run. The second that we start believing our own height, then we are yesterday's management team. So we have a healthy level of paranoia, and we have the bit between the teeth. We want to keep delivering brilliant outcomes for consumers. And within our business, what you see -- and the great shame about doing these things virtually is you don't get to come and have a look around the organization and see the culture first hand. But there's a healthy level of dissatisfaction in the business. There's a healthy level of -- we've done a good job last year. We did a good job, but how are we going to go again this year? We could do better. We weren't perfect on that project or that campaign or that time of year. So you should be reassured that whilst complacency is a risk, I think we're managing against that. I'll come back to your recreational customers and the shift. We're getting recreational customers from many different sources actually, one end of the spectrum. We benefited from, as you point out, the land base and retail. On the other hand, we're benefiting from digital natives who love sport. And there's a few other categories in between. Will we consider M&A? Well, typically, we don't talk about M&A. But what I would say is the opportunity in front of us organically is very, very strong, particularly thanks to the age profile chart that Nathan showed about high penetration in younger customers, but I'll stop there. We'll now go back to your second point, which was about behaviors of incoming newer customers and what we're doing in that space. Ben or Doug, do you want to lead off?

Thanks for the question. If I think about the difference in behavior of incoming newer customers, one recent example is, as Barni has mentioned, we're just absolutely obsessed with our customers, finding out what their drivers are, what they enjoy, what they love to bet on. And increasingly, one of the trends that we've identified is they really love the players, right, sometimes even more than the teams. And so we give them an access point for that passion through our offering of player props. We've also developed a player hub where customers can access the hub just dedicated to player info, stats, trends, and they're able to place a bit directly from there with confidence and ease. So that's one example. Another example, we've talked about Same Game Multis. That is certainly a new way that we are engaging our customers, exciting our customers, bringing the really to the forefront of the sporting match. And that's yet another example of the behavior that we're seeing where customers really love that product that they can touch and feel each part of the game as a player is getting a new disposal or a new basket or a new goal. And then the third product that I'd talk about is Bet With Mates. And as I mentioned in my earlier presentation, Bet With Mates is just a fantastic product that customers love, really taps into the social phenomenon, the social network effect, and it makes sport just even more exciting for our customers. And you would have seen from the quotes on the right-hand side of one of our slides. And it's just another example of our innovation capabilities and how we develop the customer insight to then develop the products that our customers love. I might hand over to Doug to talk about.

Yes. Thanks, Ben, and thanks, Kiranjot. I think a couple of things very quickly. Great product innovation. One of the things we then use is generosity and those broad range of mechanics. And as an example, tokenized generosity, which gives customers the freedom when and how to use that generosity. That's powerful because what that does is it encourage customers to trial products as we launch them, it gives them a great opportunity to trial those products. Another example is Power Price. So personalized boosted prices based on a data model that helps identify markets that you'll love. So you get a connection of 5 bespoke prices that are boosted for you. And again, what that does is it helps introduce products like Same Game Multi to customers, encourages adoption and repeat usage. So that's really powerful. I think the other thing we'll talk about, and we've mentioned a couple of times, and you heard in the presentation is that the role of complacency when it comes to our brand, we keep reinvigorating our brand. One of the ways we're doing that is content. You'll see that our content constantly evolves. We're looking to make sure that we don't rely on yesterday's campaign. Barni and the team often hold us to account, and we're only as good as that loss campaign. And for us, that means storytelling that's originally unique. It's clearly Sportsbet, but it's not lazy and yesterday. We keep reinvigorating what that looks like and then making sure that we can tell those stories and make punters laugh and get fans engaged with their code across multiple channels, and we touched on the work we've been doing in digital and social. If we look at our share of impressions and engagement across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, I think we're doing a great job of getting to customers in the environments that they enjoy and being able to bring our brand to life, be able to promote the great products we're delivering, but also to be able to make sure that they're aware of and can take advantage of the generosity that we make available to them. So again, it comes back to that winning formula, that's difficult to replicate, customers love and it leverages scale advantage.

Our next question today comes from Joe Thomas from HSBC. [Operator Instructions]

Just a couple of questions because I know we're running out of time now. One, just casting my mind back to a competitor of yours' presentation a couple of years ago, there was talk about over-rounds having gone up quite significantly in the Australian market in response, I think, to the point of consumption tax. And I was just hoping you could give a bit of color as to how that is evolving over time and how you would expect that to evolve. And secondly, again, just casting my mind back to prior presentations, I thought that there were sort of rules about how value could be returned to customers, especially around free bets and there were kind of regulatory restrictions. Can you just give an update on that and the means that you're finding to get around those restrictions, if indeed, they still exist?

Sure. Let's -- given that we are pressed for time, I won't waffle in advance of handing you to Ben on over-rounds, but I'll talk to your second question very briefly first. So the rules that you quite rightly recall, Joe, are around inducements. And that varies by state in Australia the extent to which you are allowed to advertise inducements, and -- but then there is a national ban on using inducements to elicit -- or actually to use the correct term, induce somebody to open a new account. So we don't find ways of getting around them. On a national basis, we don't try and induce people to open accounts using those mechanisms. And in states where we're not allowed to advertise, we don't. So that's really quite straightforward. But that doesn't stop us offering a whole suite of value to customers that we already have relationships with through all of the channels that Doug talked about. So I think there was one great slide in there that talked about how he -- in real time, he can take a product from the home screen of the Sportsbet app and put it into Facebook in jurisdictions where it's legal to do so and using the right proposition that doesn't cross any -- doesn't break any rules. So I think that answers your second question, and I might hand to Ben on over-rounds quickly.

So thank you, Joe, for the question. Look, overall, we're focused on giving customers just a fantastic experience and great value for money, and over-rounds is just one contributor to that. It's a really fluid market that's influenced by a lot of things, including competitive dynamics, different elements, including location of the event, the time before the event. But we consider the whole equation, which brings in generosity. And as Nathan showed, our net revenue has remained quite stable over time.

So it's not a tool to offset any potentially higher point of consumption tax in the future, et cetera, and hasn't been so far?

No. That's a good summary. No.

Our next question today comes from Rohan Sundram from MST. [Operator Instructions]

Just one from me, and it's regarding Slide 13. How are you viewing the outlook for industry fees and taxes? And do you see much movement there? I know we've had a period of increases, then we've had a period of stability. Is there a risk that we might be going again? And if so, how much visibility do you have around any of this?

Yes. Good question. And I think Nathan even used the language in his presentation that there is a risk that increases. I think the game here is all about how you prepare for this should it eventuate. And Nathan, I want to hand to you in a sec, I expect you'll talk a bit about the scale that we achieve in our business, how we're able to flex and what our track record is in doing both of those things so that we can absorb this if and when it does happen.

Absolutely. Yes, Barni is right. Look, as you know, we've seen that product fees and point of consumption tax have gone up over the period. And as a lot of people would know that we look at point of consumption tax and product fees as one because they're very similar in the cost to us. We've got a track record of being able to offset these and absorb these taxes. And hopefully, that comes through in the last part of our presentation, especially around the EBITDA margins. We've been up -- increase them over a period of time when the cost of sales has materially increased as well. And I think the reason for that is pretty simple. It's our scale and it's the flywheel effect that we've been able to really get motoring and being able to not only absorb those taxes, but also continue to reinvest for growth and making sure that we're growing. So it's actually worth pointing out, Rohan, that our EBITDA margin, we've not just sustained that in regards to absorbing those taxes. We've actually also increased our EBITDA margin over the last 5 years. And hopefully, Slide 66 on our deck really shows that. And probably just one other quick thing to your question there is it's also about product fees increasing, but point of consumption tax and there's differing pass-throughs to the bodies in different states, and it comes down to a lot of that pass-through of the point of consumption tax to the racing bodies as well. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of color on our thoughts on point of consumption tax and product fees.

Our final question today comes from Larry Gandler from Crédit Suisse. [Operator Instructions]

Sean, I'm conscious the people on the call have got probably a pretty busy morning and day ahead of them. So Larry, what we might offer you is if you come back through the IR team, whatever questions you've got, we'll answer as we normally would. Is that all right with you, Sean? Just -- I don't want to keep people waiting along when we've already run over. I might wrap up in that case. I'd express gratitude on behalf of the team for you guys making time. I can imagine you woke up with a fair few e-mails in your inbox this morning and some answers that needed your attention. So thank you. I hope you've got a really good impression as to what we're about and our appetite for the next phase of Sportsbet's growth. If there's any questions that we haven't been able to answer to your satisfaction, then please go back through the IR team. But with that, I'll let you get on with the very busy days that you have ahead. Thank you.

Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. You may now disconnect.