Flutter Entertainment plc (FLUT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

March 4, 2026

NYSE US Consumer Discretionary Hotels, Restaurants and Leisure Company Conference Presentations 36 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Edward Young

Analysts
#1

So hello. I'm delighted to be joined by Peter Jackson and Rob Coldrake, from Flutter. Thanks very much for joining us again at the conference.

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#2

Thank you very much for having us.

Edward Young

Analysts
#3

So you reported results last week. Revenue was up 17%, EBITDA was up 21%. But obviously, an awful lot of drivers within the business. So perhaps for ease, we'll start with the U.S., as you probably expect me to say. So I guess as a sort of short overview at the start what did you make of the U.S. performance in '25?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#4

Yes. well thank you, Ed. I mean hopefully, we'll get to speak about international...

Edward Young

Analysts
#5

You will.

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#6

As that is an important part of the business. But from a U.S. perspective, I think that -- look, let's start with the most successful part of our business, which is the iGaming business. We exited Q4 with 28% of GGR. I think our strategy of building exclusive content, having access to the loyalty program has been working really effectively for us. We're excited with the way that the business exited last year and the prospects for it through the course of this year. If I take our sports business, I have no doubt we'll talk about Q4 at some stage. Actually, the progress we're making in terms of getting towards our structural margin, making really strong progress. We remain the #1 operator here in the U.S. I think that there are a couple of areas where we were -- we lost a bit of share through the course of '25, but we know what happened. We know what we need to do to fix it. Principally amongst that, it will be our -- some changes we're making to our product and our loyalty program. But we were delighted that we're able to also launch our prediction markets product. So who would have thought that being sat here in California, we actually have a product we can make available to customers from a sports perspective. We thought that would take us much longer before we could do that.

Edward Young

Analysts
#7

Yes. Well, let's address one of the big topics straight of the bat, which is handle. Obviously, it doesn't just affect Flutter, it affected the whole market and this affected sentiment. We've seen obviously a deceleration of handle through Q4 and into the start of this year. So perhaps the most open way of asking it is, what do you think are the drivers behind that? What are you seeing from your side?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#8

Well, when I look at the business, look, handle is an important component, but we also look at our gross win margin as well, and the combination of them is what gives us our GGR. If I look at this football season in its entirety, we would have made more than a 19% margin on football, so ahead of expectations, which is a big contrast for the preceding 2 years where margins were below expectations, I think people were worried about whether we could ever get there. Actually, we hit our sort of long-term margin aspirations at the back end of the year. And I think what we have to accept for us, take December, margins doubled year-over-year. And so we shouldn't be surprised that handle come under pressure. I mean if losses were consistent, handle should have halved. Now obviously, our handle didn't halved, but handle is going to come under pressure. We see it in other markets. when you see such big swings occurring in margins. And actually, through the course of Q4, margins are getting stronger and stronger. And that was something that everybody benefited from in the -- across the sector but it does have a corresponding impact on handle.

Edward Young

Analysts
#9

Okay. So I guess, first of all, why do you think FanDuel is more affected than others because the relative handle performance was sort of worse within that. Is that related to the margin point? Or is there other kind of product or channel or sport types that were part of that, do you think?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#10

Yes. Look, I think there are 2 things which are very clear from our perspective, one, we have a structural margin advantage. So we have much higher margins than other people. And you can see that through -- into Q4, where our margins would have been 50% higher than other people in the sector. So of course, we're going to see a corresponding impact on our handle relative to other players in the market, you would expect that. And that's a function of the higher parlay mix that we get, which is because consumers are more interested in picking the parlays. One of the other factors that we saw, and look, this was an issue on us was we didn't execute our generosity strategy as well as we should have done through Q4, particularly in the face of seeing 11 weeks of unbelievably strong margin. At the same time, as the quality of content in football is deteriorating. We saw more handle on 1 of The Lions' players than we saw perhaps in the tournament, for example. That was a challenge. And so I think we didn't execute on our generosity playbook as effectively as we should have done in Q4. So I think that's compounded it for us.

Edward Young

Analysts
#11

Okay. So if we think about the -- because I guess from an investor point of view, I think it's very reasonable to see concern around handle because, yes, there's a reflexive relationship between handle and margin. But equally, at some point, margin will get to a level at which it is structurally mature or plateaued or whatever. And then underlying growth essentially is handle growth. And the guidance of this year, which we can come back to a little bit more later, but it also -- you've talked about some level of conservative within the guide and clearly, it was lower than people expected. So what you're sort of suggesting is that margin went up, so that effects handle, but the guide appears to have some conservatives around handle. So how have you embedded that kind of handle growth perspective into guidance? And on a more normalized basis, what does handle growth look like in the way you think about projecting the business going forward?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#12

Let me tell you about the 2 things we're doing to sort of face into the challenges that we saw in Q4. And then Rob can talk to you about how we're seeing the guide for the year, if that's okay. I think the first thing we -- I acknowledge our generosity strategy wasn't as effective as it could have been. So we have a lot of experience of running personalized bespoke of generosity strategies. It's even more important in the U.S. market when you're thinking about football. It's 100 games the matter. You go through the course of the season, the frequency of them drop. So volatility really gets amplified, particularly for us with our parlay mix. So we have to do a better job of making sure that we react to that on an individual customer basis. You have to deaverage this. This is complex, right? It's not straightforward, but we know how to do this. We've done it in other markets. But we're also going to launch our loyalty program in the next quarter. It's been a really important component of what's seen us win in casino building out wallet share amongst consumers, principally because we do a much better job of being consistent with generosity for people but also making sure that without spending any more money, we get a lot more bang from our buck from consumers understanding why we're giving them generosity. And so the saliency and the recognition that we offer value stepped up very significantly when we launched our loyalty program for casino. We'd expect it to do the same thing for us when we launch it in sports shortly.

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#13

And building on what Peter said from a guidance perspective, so some of the softness in volume that we saw towards the back end of the year with the extended run of bookmaker-friendly margin that we have towards the end of the year, that continued into the start of January. And it was quite a noisy NFL season overall. So I think post our guidance that we gave in Q3 for the full year 2025, we then went on a sustained run of 11 weeks where margin was ahead of where we expected it to be in the NFL. And that culminated with the last week of the year, we had a 35% margin which is quite -- and at the same time, as Peter said, we've kind of dialed back our generosity a little bit, and we found that some customers came out of the ecosystem probably had enough of betting on the NFL for the season. What we've seen post NFL, post the Super Bowl is some sequential improvement in volume, in revenue, particularly in NBA, that gives us some confidence that the '26 guide that we've got where we see some graduated improvement through the year comes to bear. The other thing that gives us confidence around the guide for the year from a sportsbook perspective is some of the initiatives that we're putting into play. We've talked to a lot of people about our loyalty scheme, sportsbook that we intend to put into play in Q2. We've talked about other product initiatives that we'll be landing throughout the course of the year, some are insurance products around the sportsbook, et cetera. And then from an iGaming perspective, we are forecasting that will be a high-teens revenue improvement year-on-year. Last year, we were in the high 30s. We always anticipated that would moderate slightly over time, but we're still seeing really good growth, still retain the market leadership. So I think the word he used was prudent but we're using a sensible measured, but we're feeling quite confident about the '26 guidance.

Edward Young

Analysts
#14

Okay. Let's turn to products. There were a few comments within the release in your remarks during results last week about competitors having stepped up. So where do you see your relative position versus competition? And what are the carriers of focus to stabilized relative position or to regrow your relative position on products?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#15

Yes. We -- talking purely about sports because obviously, I think questions we could ask or answer around casino. But talking about sports, we maintain our leadership position in parlays. I think we've got a strong position there. We can see when we benchmark our performance against others. We have a consistent advantage and you can see that in the structural margin that we have. But we're not standing still. So we'll continue to enhance and improve our parlay offering through the course of the season. But we're also doing some of what I would describe as block and tackling, the basic e-commerce building blocks of the business. Now in Q2, we'll halve the load time of the app, right, from the home page. You've got to just go after these things every now and then and so there's a bunch of grit in the system, which will --which we need to eliminate and we will do that. We found social products have been successful for us. So we had a great promotion around Thanksgiving, Pass The Leg, offer, right, where you could start with a parlays effectively pass it to me, I'd add the next leg and then turn to Rob and take that. So that sort of social product is really important. We found that to be successful for us in Australia. We see great success with that in Italy. So you'll see us do more around social in the market. And then the loyalty program is also going to be really important. It's great mechanism for us to introduce, make sure that our consumers understand what they need to do to get us to do things for them and while we're doing certain things for them we'll make sure that there's much more transparency. And I think if people feel like they've got more agency, I think they feel more engaged.

Edward Young

Analysts
#16

Okay. So it sounds a little bit on the user experience around loyalty, social. You're not really suggesting there's any major change in terms of a greater focus on in-play or a greater focus on XYZ, is that a fair read of it that you're in an okay place there? Or are there other bits behind the scene?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#17

I don't think there's anything that we'd point out. I think we've got behind in a certain area. Live is a really important area for us. But it's important for us because of the quality of our parlay products. And parlays is really important and Live. We're making improvements to sort of cash out availability and uptime. So there's stuff that we're tweaking all the time to improve. But look, I think we are behind the sector, to some extent in not having a loyalty program for our sports product. We have 1 in casino, we know how effective it is. This is something, I guess, that will be 1 area where we're catching up.

Edward Young

Analysts
#18

And the World Cup, perhaps briefly, obviously, you've got a huge global business. Is that an area of competitive advantage for the U.S. this year? Do you think you can go ahead in that area?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#19

I mean, we're super excited about the World Cup. I think about our business in Brazil, where that is popular sport that will stop the nation, all around the world, all of our different markets will participate. Soccer is actually, I think, the fourth biggest support we have here in the U.S. So it's clearly something which is really resonating with consumers in the market. And the benefits we'll have is, be able to bring our global product and expertise into the U.S. market. The way that we typically think about something like the World Cup is it's fantastic for customer acquisition, right? It's a great way of introducing our product, putting it in front of the people. And of course, the brilliant thing this year is that even in states like California, where we haven't got regulated OSB, we're going to make -- it's all incremental for us through FanDuel Predicts.

Edward Young

Analysts
#20

Let's talk promotions. You mentioned it a little bit. So you talked about sort of loyalty side going forward. But I think probably most of us have seen generosity. I mean you talked a lot about over the years, Peter, generosity and being able to tokenize it, apply it properly has been a big source of competitive advantage. And obviously, FanDuel's scale, that plays into it as well. You said very clearly, it didn't go how you wanted to, how you expected it to in Q4. Could you briefly touch on what went wrong and then what is fixing. So part of it is the loyalty scheme, but it's quite surprising thing to a lot of investors, what happened in Q4. Could you give a bit of color on what laid behind it?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#21

Yes. Look, I think it was a confluence of factors, right? And we were not anticipating that we would see such a strong set of week after week, outperformance from a margin perspective. And I think for our customers who last year and the year before, football was a very comfortable things for betting on. They're getting good returns on it. This year, the reverse was true, and it was consistent. There was literally week after -- I mean there were a bunch of Sundays where were it not for the last game on the Sunday. the favorites on it. We could have had 50% margins, right? So we're having days at 35% margin. And elastic -- sometimes it snaps, right, if you go too far. Look, I think there's some stuff that we've got to factor into our into our sort of run book around generosity. I think we were -- I think we're a bit inconsistent with the offerings for customers. I think we needed to step in and respond after a very considerable period of losses. But the factor that we have compounded to some extent was that the quality of content that is available to bet is also deteriorating as we didn't see the big teams come through.

Edward Young

Analysts
#22

Okay. Let's move on to prediction markets. First of all, I guess, the time line, we're all keen to be able to judge where FanDuel Predicts gets to on a like-for-like basis versus competition. Late last year, you were saying you have a market-leading product by Q2. Now it sounds a bit more like you'll have the product ready for NFL. So there's been -- it feels like there's been a bit of slippage there. So when is the product going to be at a point where we can see either through product comparison or through you putting marketing behind it and then app downloads, that kind of thing when you're really competing in that arena?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#23

Yes. I think what we have to think about with the FanDuel Predicts products there's 2 aspects to it. The whole sort of user experience, right, the user journey, which we're in the market now. We're learning how our customers want to use the product. But there's a bunch of enhancements we're going to fast follow through with now that the products in the market. Separately and it is separate, when you think about what the product catalog looks like in terms of the breadth and depth of content that we make available to our customers. And we're working hard on both of those things. And to some extent, the really important missing piece is landing parlays, combos in [ Predicts piece ] And we are building our market-making capability, which will allow us to light that piece up. We're excited to make sure that we build and evolve the product. We will -- we are prepared to invest money when we got a product that we can stand by from a marketing perspective. Look, there's the Soccer World Cup, obviously, the biggest opportunity for customer acquisition from a sports-focused perspective, which is what we're going to be in Predicts is going to be around the launch of the football season, right? And so that's something we have to be absolutely focused for. But Q2 is a really important time for us to do the evolution of the product experience, the catalog and also thinking about what we do from a market-making perspective, which allow us to standout the parlays solutions.

Edward Young

Analysts
#24

So perhaps 2 for you to get to that Rob. First of all, when it comes to the market making side, you've talked, I think, broadly to the margins on the overall exchange as it is at the moment. But how should we think about the incremental opportunity there? And how should we understand your sort of moving up weighting to the top end of your investment range of $200 million to $300 million losses you've got to the top end of that already so in the journey, what are you seeing or what changed that you want to put more capital behind it?

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#25

First of all, from the market-making perspective, that's where the majority of the margin lies, and that's also where our expertise lies. So it's an obvious place for us to lean into from a -- in terms of the overall economics of prediction markets. We haven't factored in any margin from market making at this point in time. We're still working through a solution, but we're pretty confident that we get something into market this year. We said last week that we anticipate being towards the upper end of the $200 million to $300 million envelope. Clearly, we've demonstrated in the past that we're very sophisticated in terms of how we think about CAC to LTVs, it's early days at the moment, and we're a bit in the test and land phase. And we don't want to spend too much until we're confident that we've got the product. So more of that's coming in Q2 when we'll have to combos and other product improvements that come. We'll start ramping up the spending at that point in time. I think the World Cup is a good opportunity for us to be able to get behind prediction markets. The thing that we're really excited about is the new NFL season because at that point in time, as we said, we should have a much more improved product offering. And that's where the big acquisition volumes are, which we're keen to get behind.

Edward Young

Analysts
#26

And you spoke last year, I remember that the virtual fireside we did back in November, maybe you were talking a bit more about the payback period, essentially, you sort of felt like '26, if you like, is the year of investment and you'd actually have most of that sort of starting to pay back on a GP basis in '27. If we're sort of looking at it a little bit later, are you probably looking at some of those losses carrying further into '27? Is that how we should be thinking about the phasing of losses?

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#27

Potentially, I mean, ultimately, there are some parallels to sportsbook. This is the big different year, we think, in terms of investment and actually with prediction markets, given some of the regulatory landscape and the fact that this could all go to the Supreme Court in a couple of years, and we don't know what will happen thereafter. It's a shorter investment time frame. So there's a big different this year in terms of the $200 million to $300 million. We then expect it to be broadly contribution positive in '27. We're not giving an exact timing point on that and then cumulatively positive into '28. In the meantime, we'd anticipate that within that time horizon, you'd see more states regulating online sports, but where, ultimately, that's the big prize for us in our North Star. That's what we're shooting towards.

Edward Young

Analysts
#28

Are you seeing any green shoots. In that regard at the moment?

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#29

I mean we're in legislative season now. Obviously, we had 1 state over the line last week. There's a number of bills that are actively being discussed. We don't like to get too far ahead of ourselves. I think what we always come back to is what we said at the Investor Day back in '24 in terms of how we think this will play out in the short to medium term. And that was 2% incremental sports population each year. We've broadly been tracking to that. This year, we have Alberta, Arkansas now, there's 1 or 2 others that are being debated. And we said one new iGaming state and there's a couple that we think are getting a bit closer there, including Virginia.

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#30

It'd be great to see iGaming state over the line.

Edward Young

Analysts
#31

Do you -- so I guess 1 of the -- if we were around the debate to where people were worrying in, I don't know, August, September, October last year, is that where you'd be able to do prediction markets at all? And you've clearly come to a point where your existing states are allowing you to continue on a normal basis, and then you're doing prediction markets in states where you don't offer OSB. So structurally, you're a little bit different. Some of the pure production markets operators who are obviously pretty national. What sort of cannibalization are you seeing or that you can detect? And how do you broadly think about the capacity for [indiscernible] to cannibalize because as you said, we're sitting here in California, you're going to have a product addressing a whole load of extra population, that's clearly an opportunity. But in the short term, especially within the context of handle, people worry about the negative side as well. So how do you frame it? What do you see in the data that gives you a perspective?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#32

Yes. Our data gives us real confidence that we're not seeing cannibalization in states where you've got regulated OSB. I think a great example of that is the recent launch we had in Missouri, where we saw 1 in 20 of the population sign up to FanDuel within the first month of us being live in the state. I think good indication of how people would prefer to take a regulated OSB over prediction markets. And there's 2 reasons for that. One is the generosity strategy that you can pursue in regulated OSB. And the second is the breadth of the product offering. And I think they're really important sort of tempo for us to maintaining our success. So when I look at the opportunities around prediction markets for us, there's a lot of incremental business working after, whether it's in California or Texas or Florida, the state we couldn't have previously addressed. And I think that's super exciting. I think there'll be -- there are going to be some states where we'll be operating Predicts where we know we'll never have regulated OSB. So Utah is never going to pass regulated OSB. We have to think about the opportunities in Utah with that in mind. Here in California, we hope that at some stage, there so -- we can see some regulated OSB come to market. So that gives us a different perspective in terms of the ability to acquire customers and better cross-sell them in the future.

Edward Young

Analysts
#33

Prediction market is fast evolving. One of the areas that I think creeps up increasingly in conversations is whether prediction markets will go into gaming adjacencies. Do you think that will happen? And if it did happen, would you follow?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#34

I think the U.S. market is unusual, and we've got relatively low levels of population penetration in terms of eligibility for iGaming. We're about 11% at the moment. And I think the best case scenario, you can see that getting to is 40%. Now that will be a big step-up from where we are. But it still means there's going to be 60% of the U.S. population going to be living in states where there's no online provision for iGaming. And I think it is interesting to ask yourself a question around how are people meeting that need today? When we look at the prevalence of retail 1 day options, when we look at some of the equity trading that's happening. When we think about some of the other financial markets that people are speculating, are they getting that -- they're scratching that sort of dopamine hit that ordinarily they would have gor through iGaming in that area. And I think there are many other closer substitutes we see social casino and other products as well. So I think the extent to which we can participate in that sort of white space, which is not our regulated, I guess, it's really interesting for us. I think there's a possibility that prediction markets allows people to play there, but I think there's other angles as well that we can contemplate.

Edward Young

Analysts
#35

Okay. Europe's largest gambling market is Italy. Business retook top spot there during Q4. Could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing there? There's obviously a licensing event? Do you see that as a big opportunity to get a step change in market share and perhaps ask you to touch on Snaitech integration, which this is where the rubber hits the road this year, I guess?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#36

Rob, do you want to pick that up?

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#37

Yes, we're delighted of our performance in Italy. And this is our business since we acquired, it has gone from strength and strength, particularly from an online perspective. Since Snai came under the Flutter umbrella last year, we've really seen a turnaround in terms of the underlying performance, and that's into growth year-on-year, and we're operating some of the playbook that we've already deployed within Sisal. We brought it into an SCA framework. We've got the Sisal team, have got the experience of the market running alongside the Snai team. So we're really pleased about it. In terms of the online licensing piece, we don't see that as a huge game changer in terms of market share. We think it's probably worth 1% or 2% market share to us. Clearly now, 1 of the interesting things when we have our operational reviews with the SCA team is the amount of times they use all-time high and record. I mean every month, they're coming back. And they're actually -- the underlying performance is extremely strong, essentially in Sisal and Snai. We've got great business in Turkey, where the growth is 30% plus year-on-year. We've put a Poker product, the PokerStars transformation, the first part of that is in Italy, it's performing fantastically. We've actually had better numbers on our Poker product in Italy in 2025 -- at the end of 2025 than we did during COVID in an all-time record period. So really we've got Tombola being deployed in Italy now as well. So really pleased with the trajectory in Italy and the growth prospects which we're seeing through this year.

Edward Young

Analysts
#38

At the same time you did Snaitech, you did NSX in Brazil to do that and you have upweighted your investment into Brazil this year. Looks like margin was pretty tough for everyone in H2, but what sort of underlying trends are you seeing there competitively in Brazil? Why is now the right time to put more investment in? And how should we think about the sort of growth prospects through this year and into next year.

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#39

So we're incredibly excited about the Brazilian market. It's a huge market, very soccer-focused, plays to a lot of our expertise. And we're really pleased with the progress that we've made since we bought Betnacional. So we've put a number of experts from around the business down into Brazil. A lot of their processes were actually quite immature when we bought them, they didn't really have any meaningful generosity or CRM, we've gone in and fixed quite a lot of basics, actually, in the second half of the year, lapping the regulation that obviously saw in the first part of last year, we've seen some brilliant green shoots within Betnacional. And that gives us huge confidence to put this additional investment behind it. We think 2026 is going to be a key year. We feel really validated because actually, at the same time, the Betfair business that we had in Brazil, we've been struggling to get as much traction with that business. Whereas with Betnacional, we're really getting traction and moving forward. So we're tremendously excited. I think the World Cup is going to be a big event in Brazil as well. And I think our Brazilian business will go from strength to strength.

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#40

The 1 thing I'd add is when I think about the integration efforts that we're making, we've seen early success in casino. And I think we're seeing really strong performance there in Betnacional. We know we've got some exciting stuff to do from a user experience upgrade, we're going to deliver and all of our pricing capability or see in land. So we -- that's why we want to put our money behind the strength and momentum we're seeing in the market.

Edward Young

Analysts
#41

And the U.K., obviously, it's a big part of the international business. Obviously, some very difficult tax headwinds to face, what do you see? Are you seeing anything so far in terms of operator response? Or what should we expect in terms of what your posture will be, I guess, through that transition from April onwards?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#42

We've made sure that we've positioned our business to think through the tax changes, right? So we're already reflecting that into all of our CAC to LTV calculations, and we set ourselves up to work on that basis. Even with that additional tax burden, I think we're very -- we see very good returns, right? So I think the question for us is how we can invest even more into the U.K. market. We've got more headroom in gaming than we actually have in sports. And we think we've got some really good opportunities to dial that out with some of the content that we have. I think we'll see some of the longer-tail operators struggle post the tax changes, but I don't think they're going to take action before they start seeing their new tax bill landing and the impact that, that has in the business.

Edward Young

Analysts
#43

Okay. going to a little bit about '26 and leading to the '27 CMD guidance. It's been from September '24, when you laid it out, we've been working towards it. Obviously, with the '26 guide where it is, which is little progression year-on-year in terms of EBITDA. It doesn't make those targets look very stretching, let's put it that way. So I really wanted to focus, Rob, if you have a perspective on how that affects the cash conversion targets as well. Because I think that's a big part of what we found positive around the CMD, obviously, with less EBITDA progression that creates some sort of pressure, but you've also talked about optimization and platforming and all these other kinds of stuff in remarks. So how should we think about cash conversion in this business this year and into next year, what's the right kind of normalized state for improvement?

Rob Coldrake

Executives
#44

Yes, I mention just before I come on to cash quickly is that in terms of our medium- to longer-term guidance from an EBITDA perspective, we're very confident around the foundational blocks. So think about the key things and tenets that we talked about in terms of structural win margin, the progress that we're making around that, the penetration within the sportsbook, the iGaming growth, the operating leverage. These are all things that will deliver potentially been pushed slightly to the right from where they are, given where we are with our '26 guidance, but the fundamental foundation is still in place. From a cash conversion perspective, there's a few things that give us real confidence about the ability to really dial up the adjusted free cash flow conversion over time. One is the transformation work that we're doing. So at the Investor Day, we talked about a $300 million envelope of costs that we're going to take out of the business. A lot of this delivered by the various transformation initiatives that we have in play, one being the PokerStars transformation, which we talked about earlier with Italy and other being the Sky Bet migration in the U.K., the Snai synergies, all of these progressing really well. By the time we get to '27, a lot of that will be delivered, and that cost will be out in the business. That cost is exceptional costs at the moment. So that cost comes out of the business and hopefully leads like we've seen with PokerStars in Italy to some of the top line improvement as well. We're going to have CapEx efficiency. So if you think about the CapEx within the business at the moment, circa $800 million, a lot of that we're spending on tech and product. we're going through a review at the moment. But actually, of the 8,000 technologists that we've got in the business, a huge proportion of that is the software development life cycle. A lot of this is now being done by AI or supported by AIs. We're looking at the amount that we spend on tech within the business, there's huge efficiencies within CapEx. And tax as well, which has made some changes to our debt structuring where we've moved some of our debt. The U.S. becomes more tax efficient, and we think we're going to make more tax over this time. There's a bunch of things coming through, very quickly, I would say adjusted free cash flow conversion for '25 was around 25%. We think that will move into the low to mid-30s this year. And we're very much working towards our longer-term target of 40% plus.

Edward Young

Analysts
#45

Okay. In a few seconds we have left, Peter, when you look towards '26, what are you most excited about? What do you think is perhaps least appreciated about when you look at the business and excite you and when you talk to investors about where they are, what's the area you're most focused on?

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#46

I think we spend more time talking about international now just today than I have done in many meetings. And that I think is a very important component for us. When we think about the progress of some of these transformation initiatives and the impact that, that has on the sort of EBITDA progression that the business will have. But I think here in the U.S., our casino business is performing incredibly well and it's going from strength to strength. We're really using our scale to our advantage there. And I'm super excited to see what we can deliver this year in sports off the back of the loyalty program changes we're making and some of the other initiatives we've got. And also this big new opportunity to go after the half of Americans who can't currently access our regulated OSB with Predicts.

Edward Young

Analysts
#47

Okay. Thank you very much.

Jeremy Jackson

Executives
#48

Thank you.

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