Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for the FDJ Conference Call. I'll now hand over to Madame Stéphane Pallez, Chairwoman and CEO. Madame, please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. I am with Pascal Chaffard, Executive Vice President, Finance, Performance, and Strategy. You probably have read the press release that we circulated a few minutes ago after market close. The slideshow that we will comment is available on our website. I am going to give you a first general comment of those results and this communication. Pascal will go more into the details of our figures. Just to mention, I have a press interview that I have to do on TV, and I have to leave you at 6:30 P.M. Pascal will continue, and of course, will stay with you for the rest of the Q&A, and will conclude the call. Sorry for that, but difficult to accommodate everybody at this time of the day.
Just general comment is to say, as you have seen and looking at slide three, that we had good momentum in Q3, which has highlighted our resilience that we started, I think, that we showed all along the last weeks and months during this crisis. Resilience thanks to our business model, our strong business model, and our responsiveness or reactivity. Of course, at this time, we are talking on a day where our President, Mr. Macron, is going to be on TV tonight, probably announcing strengthening measures that I do not know at this point. Of course, everything that we say cannot take into account any, I would say, very strict and general measures that would affect our business. We will have to examine that further on.
If we exclude this at this point, what we have seen in Q3, we believe, is a good momentum and could continue into Q4. We have seen a limited decline of, and then on the basis of this belief that we have today, we believe that we could end up the year with a limited decline of 6%, -6% in sales for the full year and maintain, actually, quite a nice EBITDA margin of around 21%. I think if this would end up, I think it would be good news for everybody, for us, and of course, for our investors. We believe it is actually feasible. When we look into more details at our Q3, you know, because you have been following us, since the end of lockdown, mid-May, we have seen a gradual recovery.
It has accelerated in June with the gradual resumption of sporting events, particularly the European football, and the reopening of bars in our networks, and the relaunch of Amigo after its voluntary suspension by us. During the second part of June, as we said during our first half results, FDJ's activity has been back to levels comparable to 2019, same month. We have seen this good momentum confirmed in Q3 with stakes increased by 6% overall. This has to be explained by an unusual summer period with a very busy sporting events calendar, which is, of course, the consequence of the postponement of many events that were initially scheduled for Q2. Another, I think, interesting feature in our Q3 is the fact that both our point of sale and our online distribution performed quite well with growth in both.
Point of sale stakes were up more than 3%, and online stakes still continue to increase, up 44%. That is, of course, one other good trend. I will also stress another point, which is important to understand those results, which is that although our stakes were up 60%, our revenues are stable. This is actually not a surprise. This should not be a surprise to you because we, I think, underlined when we talked about our first half results, the fact that the player payout in the sports betting activity could not be sustained, could not be sustained at this level with normal level of activity.
This is, I think, what happened, and even maybe stronger than we expected, since not only, of course, the sports betting activity came back, as we said, so it was close to 20% of our business versus 18% in Q3 2018, as I mentioned earlier. We also had a very higher return to players in this activity, and Pascal will comment that further on. That is, I think, something that has to be understood clearly to understand where we are now. At this point, what we consider as an outlook for the full year is stakes around EUR 16 billion, which would mean a limited decline of 6% year- on- year, minus 6% in terms of stakes. What it means is that our anticipation for the Q4 is a mild increase in stakes in Q4.
Of course, based on the assumption, as I said further, that there would be no, I would say, drastic and general measures at the point that it would affect our business and no cancellation or postponement of key sporting events. What we expect at this point, again, all things being equal, is quite a busy lottery schedule. This is, I think, what we have, of course, usually at the end of the year. We have, I would say, a usual busy lottery schedule with the relaunch of a number of our games such as Keno, Mots Croisés, Crosswords, which are scratch cards family games, and Amigo and other games. We have also quite a good and busy schedule for sporting events, which is broadly comparable in terms of volume of what we had in Q4 2019.
On that basis, and assuming return to players broadly in line with that of the first nine months, and of course, taking into account our cost savings plan that has been implemented fully at this point, we now expect full year revenue of around EUR 1.9 billion, which would mean -7% compared to 2019, and EBITDA margin around 21%, which is a little higher, actually, than the one that we had at the end of 2019. 2019 was 20.6% on a comparable adjusted basis. That, I think, would be quite a good performance. Again, we believe that at this point, we are in a situation to go for it. As I said, our cost reduction plan has been implemented, but it has also been used, designed, and used in order to accompany the rebound of our activity.
Therefore, we have quite a strong advertising program in Q4, and our CapEx budget has been protected to continue to invest in our further development and accelerate our investment supporting our strategic priorities. We also have in mind, of course, that further on in 2021, we have to sustain quite a strong marketing schedule, but this we'll talk more later on. I will stop at this point and hand over to Pascal to get you more into the details of different figures. Of course, I will be able to answer some of your Q&A, some of your questions if Pascal is not too long. Thank you.
Thank you, Stéphane. I take the challenge. Good evening. I will just stress two more points on slide number four because the figures, you can read it, and Stéphane has already talked a little bit about it. First, as mentioned by Stéphane, the strong increase in the player payout combined with the impact of the higher share of sports betting, we have said that, now 22% versus 18%, can come with a higher sports betting PPO over Q3. I will come back specifically on this point in two slides with graphics. Just as a reminder, FDJ revenue is a percentage of the gross gaming revenue. It means stakes minus player payout. When the player payout is increasing, revenue is decreasing. That is why you see 6% growth on the stakes and a barely flat revenue in Q3.
The second thing I would like to highlight is the partial recovery of the stakes and revenue lost during the first half thanks to a good performance in the third quarter. If we see the nine-month stakes, they amount to EUR 11.3 billion, and they are down only 10% year- on- year. They were down respectively 18% for the stakes and 15% for the revenue when we compare it at what we said for the first half of the year. If we now go right to the slide number five to give you some maybe more information about our Q3 activity, sports betting stakes grew strongly, up 27% to nearly EUR 1 billion, driven by the postponement of many sporting events from Q2 to Q3, as Stéphane mentioned it before.
Lottery recorded a moderate 1% increase in stakes to EUR 3.4 billion with first promotional activity of instant games resumed and 2% increase in stakes. Instant games benefited from the good restart of Amigo but suffered from the comparison with Q3 2019, which saw long cycles of an exceptional nature. We communicated a lot last year on those exceptional events. To make it easy to understand, the average jackpot of EuroMillions in September 2019 was EUR 170 million when it fluctuated from EUR 17 million to EUR 130 million in September 2020. If we exclude those exceptional long cycles, draw games would have increased by 6% in Q3. Just to stress that it's for us a normal behavior of those games. On slide six, you have the graphic of the player payout, and it enables you to, with some more color on this player payout ratio, in particular the sports betting one.
At end June, sports betting player payout was 73.1%, a sharp 460 basis point drop from its H1 2019 level. We told a lot about that at the end of July. As we said, this was mainly due to the very nature of the few sports betting events that occurred in Q2, such as football championship games in Belarus, for example, for which correctly predicting the outcome was much more challenging for our players. In Q3 alone, the trend reversed with a player payout increase of 600 basis points to around 80%. This can be explained by the very strong performance of both Paris and Lyon football club in the European Champions League, for example, and leading at a stable nine-month sports betting PPO of around 76.5%. If you see the situation of nine months, it is a normal situation.
These swings in sports betting PPO, as well as the change of the relative weight of the sports betting in total group stakes, are the main drivers behind the overall change in the group player payout. As you have noticed, the group player payout is barely unchanged year- on- year at 68.1% versus 68.2% last year. If we move now to the next slide, you may recall that slide number seven. You may recall that at the beginning of the year, over the period from 1 January to mid-March, stakes were increasing in line with our full year guidance at that time. Q3 saw a return to growth, and beyond this atypical summer, September saw a return to the level of stakes recorded in Q1 pre-COVID and in line with our pre-COVID forecast. This is interesting to be mentioned.
To conclude on slide eight, you see on this slide the figures that have been highlighted by Stéphane. On top of the elements of the full year 2020 guidance already detailed, I would like to say that we are also confident that we will maintain an EBITDA to free cash flow conversion rate of more than 80%, as it was in our original guidance. We come back to this original guidance. We did not mention our dividend policy because it has not changed. We still target 80% player payout ratio calculated on FDJ consolidated net results. Thank you for your attention. Now, Stéphane and I will be happy to answer your question, and I've done my best to be short.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, you may press 01 on your telephone keypad. 01 on your telephone keypad. We have one first question from Mr. James Ainley from Citi. Sir, please go ahead.
Yeah. Good evening, everybody. Congratulations on another good performance. I'm just interested to hear a bit more about how the margin performance that you're guiding to colors your thinking about the performance next year. The implication from what you've said is that second-half margins will be around 21.5%. Is that a fair run rate we should be thinking about for 2021? I suppose underlying that, are there any positives or negatives to think about, thinking whether there are some annualization benefits from the cost saving program and annualization benefits from the recent acquisition of Bimedia that might kind of impact that outlook? Thank you.
Thank you for your question. As you have certainly noticed, we are giving 2020 outlook. We're not giving today 2021 guidance. Frankly speaking, I think it's quite bold from us to give 2020 outlook, but I think at this point of the year, it's also reasonable and given the fact that we had this good performance. I don't think we're going to give you much more details on 2021, but maybe I will let Pascal complement on the question, which is what in the EUR 80 million cost savings plan, what could you expect to be reproduced in 2021?
Yes. Maybe to comment a little bit. The Q3 this year was quite specific because we had a good activity, as you have noticed, with barely no advertisement because we began again advertisement in September. July and August, the business went by itself as people were in France. French people were in France for their holidays as point of sale were opened during all the summer for a part of them. It is quite atypical. It's not sustainable to have such a quarter with such a low investment in advertisements. Just to give you a clue about 2021, it's not as easy to do the same performance as we did in the Q3. When you say you have a 21.5% EBITDA margin on the H2, the half of H2 is Q3. You have to take that into account.
Second point about the savings plan, you have to remember that half of the savings plan is advertisement. Next year, we will advertise our games, advertise our brand, and we will also advertise big events like European Championship or Tokyo Olympic Games. It will be those savings will not be savings for 2021. Second thing important also to mention, those EUR 80 million are in regard with the 2020 budget of FDJ, not the 2019 figures. If we compare the savings with the 2019 figures, it's EUR 30 million and not EUR 80 million. It gives you not the total answer, but a clue to guess what could be the savings that we can prolong on the 2021 year next year.
Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you very much.
Thank you, sir. Next question is from Mr. Jaafar Mestari from Exane BNP Paribas. Sir, please go ahead.
Hi. Good afternoon. I've got three questions, please. The first one is on your guidance for the full year. If I read correctly, you're stating that any general lockdowns would obviously put it in jeopardy. Can you talk us through what sort of smaller, more local disruptions you have taken into account? Have you seen any impact, for example, when the bars in Paris were ordered to close, etc.? What degree of disruptions is baked in your guidance, please? My second question is on your online mix. I think at the H1, you talked about your online mix almost doubling during the lockdown as all the point of sales were closed. If I look at the online performance in this quarter, it looks like it hasn't reverted at all. Would that be correct?
It looks like 9% of your stakes were placed online, whereas it was sort of 6% the year prior. That looks like the biggest improvement you've done in a quarter where all the point of sales were open. If you could talk a little bit about the consumer behavior there and have some people reverted to offline or all of the improvements been sticky. My last question would be if you could detail a little bit the marketing schedule in Q4, especially for draw games because you will still have pretty difficult comparables in Q4 2019. You've talked about some of these. They look to be concentrated on smaller games than last year, like Keno. What sort of growth can you deliver on that marketing push?
Okay. Thank you for your question. I will start quickly to answer and will let Pascal finish because I have to run quite soon from now. On the question of what type of sanction can we have, did we take or can we take within our guidance in terms of sanitary measures? It's a tricky question because, of course, it's quite difficult to, I would say, to predict what will be the sanitary situation and what kind of measures we will have and what kind of impact they will have. We have clearly resisted about predicting something big and putting it into the guidance. What we have done is we have looked, as your question also, as you mentioned in your question, we have looked at the impact that we actually measure on the closing of bars.
Actually, the bars that are really only bars, as you certainly know, and it's only in some cities of France, not in all France. This, frankly, is not material compared to all the risks that we have in our business. That type of local and limited measures, I would say we can accommodate it. What is not clearly in our guidance is general lockdown, although we believe that general lockdown probably will be different in terms of impact as the first one. We have not, again, we have not put that in our guidance because, well, our government has been stating that they do everything to not to go for that. After that, you can have some new measures. Everybody is talking today in France about curfew. Curfew is the new trendy word. What kind of curfew, where, and at which scale, I don't know.
Of course, this has not been put into our guidance since it's not decided, and we have no idea of what it's going to be and how it could impact our business at this point. Frankly, it's quite difficult to be more specific than that. A word maybe on the online mix, and after that, I will have to go. On the online mix, we have actually, during the two months of the lockdown, we had, as you said, we doubled the online stakes for the lottery. Now, what we have is something intermediate, which is actually quite nice in terms of online growth, which is over 40%.
Clearly, we have something which is both good news in terms of a trend that is sustained, but not at the same level that we had during the lockdown because our players, and they have said that in the studies that we made, a number of our players have come back to the point of sale and said that they like to play in the point of sale. We have, at the same time, I think, a good trend because over 40% of growth on online stakes is a good trend. Also, clearly, a number of people that have been coming back to the point of sale, which is, I think, good too. I think at this point, our last assumption about the share of online stakes in the lottery stakes is, I think, around 8%, if I'm correct.
Not exactly the nine, but again, it's been clearly nicely increasing. Of course, we would like to sustain this trend as much as possible. The teams here are saying that the last quarter of the year is a quarter where we have a lot of events in the point of sale. It might not be the best quarter to have the highest performance on online sales, but I tend to think that we have certainly, during the lockdown period, acquired something in terms of online players that will not disappear. We'll see. Sorry to leave you at this point.
Thank you very much.
I will certainly talk later on, and Pascal will complement me on your third question and on that. Thank you very much.
No problem. Goodbye, Stéphane. I will answer the third question about the marketing schedules on draw games. Yes, we have a number of relaunches this month, Keno and Amigo. Yes, Keno is a quite small game if you compare it to Loto. It's one-third the size of Loto, but Amigo is quite sizable with the same size as Loto is. It is quite an important one. We also have a number of jackpots, and a new EUR 130 million jackpot will occur in November about EuroMillions. We will have that. We also have Friday 13th and some events at the end of the year. What is important to understand on our Q4 is, as Stéphane said, the saving plan made it possible for us to reinvest on advertisement support for our relaunches and activity, lottery and sports betting activity on Q4.
All those things will have an advertising support. We think even if the comparison with 2019 is a hard comparison, we had stronger numbers on Q4 for lottery and especially on draw games on Q4 last year. We think that it will be possible to do even more than last year on this fourth quarter if the sanitary measures make it possible, obviously.
Thank you very much for this.
Thank you, sir. We have a next question from Madame Sabrina Blanc from Société Générale. Madame, go ahead.
Yes. Good evening. I have two questions, if I may. The first one is, as you mentioned, that you don't have a clear visibility on what could happen this evening and concerning potential local lockdown. Nevertheless, could we have a sort of breakdown between the point of sales between big cities and regions, if it makes sense? The second question is regarding the sports betting. Do you have any comments about the payout that you have in mind for the end of the year? Shall we have still a lot of pressure, competitive pressure? What is the sports calendar? Do you expect a sort of normalization?
Okay. Okay. For your first question, I don't think I have the figure you asked for, the breakdown of our point of sale between big cities and regions. I can say it in another way. If we have some, yes. Now, it's hard for me to say to have this kind of measure like that. You can think it another way. We have a point of sale where the population is. You can guess that it is linked to the level of population you have in each region. You have maybe one-fifth of our point of sale in the Paris region because there is one-fifth of the population there, something like that. I think it's a correct guess. We really don't know if a local lockdown will occur or not.
We really don't know if a curfew will occur or not. About curfew, what we can say, if it's a curfew after 11:00 P.M. or 10:00 P.M. or even 8:00 P.M., it is not a very bad thing for us because our point of sale usually are closed after 7:00 or 8:00 P.M. The question would be sports betting. How can sports betting be organized if it's not possible to go out after 8:00 P.M.? I think the different leagues will adapt their schedules to this new thing if it happens. On sports betting, it's very hard to also sorry because the two answers are not very clear. It's very hard to guess what can be the player payouts of the end of the year. What we know that it will depend on the results of the different games. We will see.
What we have in our guidance, we have prolonged the nine years to the 12 years. Quite a normalization of the player payouts on the fourth quarter. This is our best guess, but it can be over that or a little bit under that also. The calendar expected is, as we know now, quite normal. We expect it's not the exact calendar that should have been done in the fourth quarter. All in all, we will have as we will have an offer quite comparable to the one of 2019. If I can take one or two examples, for example, on tennis, we will not have Asian tournaments.
On football, we will have more football matches and even football matches until 31st of December because the different championships are quite late, and they have to have more days of playing days since the end of the year. Globally, we think the offer is quite comparable to the one of last year. Again, if sports betting are not canceled or postponed because of new sanitary measures, but that we do not have taken it into account in our guidance.
Okay. Thank you very much to answer my test questions.
Thank you, Madame. We have a next question from Mr. Gérard from CIC. Sir, please?
Yes. Good evening, Pascal. Two questions on my side. A very general question on the online sports betting market. There seems to be new players entering the French sports betting market recently. I'm referring to Groupe Barrière. Can we have an idea of how fierce this market is becoming? Are you aware of new initiatives from other players trying to enter the market? More generally speaking, how did you see your market share change from the beginning of the year to date in that market? This is my first question. Second question is a very basic question regarding your balance sheet situation at the end of this year. Given that EUR 400 million EBITDA guidance that you are giving us tonight, what should be the net financial debt situation of the group at the end of this year? Thank you.
Okay. On your first question, interesting question on this, on the online sports betting market. What we can say globally before going to your precise question is we have seen more of the crisis than other types of crisis. It means that we are doing well in sports betting, but others are also doing well. If we look at the first figures or the first guess that we can have on the Q3 of the global market in France, we think that the global market in stakes has been growing quite fast also. What we have seen is the pace of the growth of the sports betting market and our growth also is comparable to the one we had pre-COVID.
I don't know if it's an effect that will last forever, but what I can see now in Q3 and what we expect in Q4 is to see a market continuing to grow as if the crisis has not been there. This is the first thing. Second thing, the newcomers into this market. You have Groupe Barrière, but also Partouche, but it's not real newcomers. I explain myself. They don't apply for license directly. The license is the Vbet license, and they licensed their brand to make some sports betting and also poker, maybe horse racing also, to market their brand on this market. We don't think that those players will be real challengers for the big players of this market. It's more a way to value the brand Partouche or the brand Barrière in this market that is becoming quite big.
Another player has not entered this market, but we think they have new ambitions. It's PokerStars. PokerStars business market very well or very hard their sports betting brand. They changed their sports betting brand in France and elsewhere in Europe for PokerStars Sports. They have begun since September to market this brand. We think that they have some ambitions to be bigger in this market. Last thing on this market regarding our position, I will not give you our market share because we don't give the market share. What we could have feared, what other people could have feared looking at our situation in sports betting as we did not have any poker during the crisis or also race betting during the crisis.
We could have feared that some of our players would have stopped playing with FDJ and began to play with Winamax, for example, sports bet, and play poker with Winamax and then stay on Winamax. Really, we do not see that. Our trend is good. We are doing well, and we do not see any problem regarding the lockdown period. We could have feared that people in the point of sales would have played more online and then stayed online. It is not the case. If you look at our figures, 27% of growth on sports betting Q3, it is very high. We think that our position has not been weakened by the lockdown period. On our balance sheet, I asked Janet, could you give me our net financial position? There are two ways to see it.
The amount of cash that we have and the amount of cash will be over EUR 1 billion. If we see our net debt, it's a negative net debt. It means that it's net cash. This net cash is some hundreds of million euros. Maybe I can have the precise number in a minute. I don't think it's a problem to give this number. It will come in a minute.
All right. Thank you, Pascal.
Okay. Yes. Some hundreds of million euros. Next question?
We don't have any more questions, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to remind you that if you wish to ask a question, you may press.