Thank you, Vaughan, and good afternoon to everyone here in London. Welcome to our 2022 Capital Markets Day. Both of you who are here with us in London, and I see many familiar faces we haven't seen for a while, but also to all the people who are joining us online. I'm Itai Pazner, to those of you who don't know me, the CEO of 888 since 2019, having been with the group for over 20 years now.
As you can see on the agenda on slide three, we've got a packed afternoon ahead of us, and it gives me great pleasure that you will be able to hear not only from myself today, but also from some of the management team that are here with us in the event today. In terms, just in terms of the logistics of the event, we'll leave plenty of time at the end for questions, so if you can keep the questions till the end. We will also be happy to answer more informal questions after the event over some drinks and canapés that we'll have in an after event.
We'll also ensure to leave plenty of time for the England versus Wales game that coincidentally, we have a special offer on William Hill today for that match, which is Kane first score at seven to two. I'd highly recommend to everyone that doesn't have the app to actually download the app, if you can do it after the presentation and concentrate on the presentation. As I think you'll see firsthand what we mean when we speak about product and content leadership. Moving on to slide four. Today we're going to lay out a highly focused strategy that we're confident will deliver superior shareholder returns.
You'll hear from some of the senior management in the team, an incredibly strong team that we have with us here today, that I have personally handpicked from across William Hill, 888, and from externally. In addition to these speakers, we have Mark Skinner here with us today, our Chief People Officer, and Elena Chambers, our Chief of Staff, that will be with us in the event after, and you can ask them questions as well. On slide four, you can see all of the senior leadership team that we have. It's a team with a broad experience and in-depth expertise in the sector, as well as a wide range of capabilities. I believe this is exactly what we need in order to deliver our plans.
We're building a strong team culture that brings together the best of both of these businesses. I am determined to ensure that the sum of these great historic businesses creates a combination that is bigger, stronger, and better together. Turning over to slide five. This is just a reminder of why I'm so excited about the combination of 888 and William Hill. 888, as you know, is a technology and gaming business by DNA, with a scalable global platform and huge digital capabilities. William Hill is a bookmaker by DNA with an iconic brand that's instantly recognized across the U.K. The combination of these complementary businesses gives us a really powerful opportunity.
Since coming together in July, everything that I have found has only strengthened my view about the power of this combination and the strategic rationale that has led us into the deal. The brand recognition and customer loyalty to the William Hill brand in the U.K., which is second to none. The enhanced customer experience of William Hill sports betting products in the U.K., and the trading capabilities that we have at William Hill. The strong operations and customer support capabilities and the friendly and professional and passionate customer-fronting retail teams that we have and the quality of the William Hill retail estate.
The overall quality of the teams and the colleagues across William Hill has been very reassuring and combining all of these with 888's gaming assets, technology, digital marketing and data capabilities has only enforced that our decision to acquire William Hill International and combine the two companies together to become a global powerhouse in our industry was the right strategic path for our group. We're a much larger company now with improved diversification, stronger position in our core markets and access to a suite of world-class brands and a leading retail presence in the U.K. As we leverage our proprietary technology, the huge amount of combined experience and talent across the group, we feel confident about unlocking the potential from this combination. Over to slide six.
This slide emphasizes the scale that we have now and the power of the combination. As we go through the presentation today, the team will expand on how we are focused on a successful integration and delivering on the promise of this combination and how our enhanced scale will secure a long-term leading position and create value. Turning to slide seven. Here you can see an overview of what the business looks like on a pro forma basis today. One of the major integration tasks that we've already delivered is setting the new operating model for the future. Our operating model is built around two geographical businesses, one being the U.K. and the second one, the international business, with a strong central service unit that supports the local business units
This model gives us a combination of scale benefits from our central functions and proximity to our key markets and the local customers. This will also allow us to drive market share gains. Looking at the size of the business today, just in terms of the numbers that we generate in the different parts of the business, we generate over GBP 700 million of online revenue in the U.K. and Ireland. We are the number three by revenue in the U.K. and number four in Ireland. We are just over GBP 500 million of U.K. retail revenue, the number two operator by revenue in the U.K.
We generate a little over GBP 600 million of revenue from our international markets, with leading positions in markets like Spain, Italy and Denmark, and significant future growth opportunities in further markets. We also generate around GBP 20 million in the U.S., where we will generate growth at a relatively low cost base. We are a diversified business now, and 50% of the revenues are coming from online gaming, just under 30% from retail and 20% from online betting. Turning to slide eight. As I mentioned, this combination is incredibly attractive from a strategic perspective, and we're confident that it will deliver strong shareholder returns. However, since announcing this acquisition, there have been some material external challenges and changes that we must address.
In the short term, we're facing some significant challenges, and these have led us to adapt our approach towards integration. Right now, we have around GBP 1.8 million in debt. We are determined to reduce that level of debt. The cost of the debt is also higher than what we had planned, as the interest rates and debt markets have moved against us since announcing this deal. Therefore, deleveraging is our top priority. We also have a combination of three platforms across the group, which is the 888 platform, the William Hill platform, and the Mr Green platform. In addition to this, in some of the markets, the brands that we have are actually competing against each other. This fragmented approach and duplicating operating tech structure means that our margins are lower than peers, and that's something that we must address and change.
We have a strong plan to address all of this with a disciplined approach to investment in our markets, both where we invest and actually how we invest in terms of our different brands. We are also incredibly focused on cost efficiency, with a clear commitment to building a truly scalable business by removing duplication functions. Today, we are increasing our synergy target from GBP 100 million to GBP 150 million, Yariv will expand on that next after me. In the medium term, we also face challenges with integration, focus and execution, which are natural in this kind of combination. One of the advantages of our global scalable platform is that we can operate in almost any market that we want anywhere. That also comes with a potential risk, which is lack of focus and discipline.
We are addressing this risk through a very structured market framework and building a slimmed down and streamlined business that is focused on execution in our key markets. Vaughan will expand about that shortly as well. Over the longer term, we face a number of ongoing challenges as an industry, and these are not challenges that are unique to us, but there are some longer term risks around regulations and fast consolidations in different markets. We are addressing this by building a significant scale, both within our business operations and at the local level in our key markets, where we're targeting to be a top three market position across our core and growth markets to build a sustainable and high margin business that is resilient to future risks in the industry.
Moving over to slide nine and having outlined our challenges, I'm pleased to say that we do have a strong plan to address all of these issues. I'm confident that our plan will build a much more profitable business. This plan will set us up for the next decade of growth. Our integration will take us about two years, and this is how we're thinking about the different phases of the business. On this slide, what you can see is our evolved strategic roadmap, which is based on three different phases: our position, our current position, our plan, and the potential of this company. Our current position is a newly combined business. Like I said, we have multiple operating structures, multiple tech platforms and brands that are sometimes competing against each other.
This drives inefficiency and EBITDA margins that are just not high enough. Our plan over the next couple of years is to focus on integration and deleveraging. This will create a higher margin, more nimble business. This robust plan will unlock huge potential in the future. Our proprietary tech stack and scalable operations will allow us to compete at a lower cost, and our world-class brands in marketing and customer excellence will drive market share gains in our target markets. Integration and our tech migration are critical to our vision, and these are my personal top priorities. Culture and the team are critical to getting this part right as well, and we're building a powerful, agile, and engaged and unified team culture. Rather than telling you more about this culture, I'll be happy to share with you a video that outlines how we're doing this with our teams.
I think it's the one of the biggest benefits of working here. I can work with really passionate and talented people.
The people are great. The people kinda make it, and everybody's kinda got a passion for what they do, so it's a great environment to kinda thrive in.
I have a lot of friends that work here at the moment, so it's like a little family for me already.
It's different. You know, you could be male, female, black, white. It doesn't make a difference. You know, everybody's respected.
I love our culture. I love our people. I love the support from my team and from my manager.
I think the culture is amazing. The people are great. I enjoy getting up and coming to work every day.
It gave me the opportunity to learn, to explore, and to develop myself.
There's opportunities all over the world, never mind just in the U.K.
Whether it's to work as a customer experience assistant or to move on to something else, but I definitely think that they have set me up for life.
Okay. another significant enabler, apart from our people and our culture, and a key focus for us is our technology platform. Probably one of the most exciting things that we are doing is building a unified technology platform for the group. This will be a best-in-class product and content platform with all the knowledge and capabilities that we gained across 888 and William Hill. On slide 11 here, you can see the outline of the decisions that we took to build our future platform. For the past five months and since completion, we have been working hard on our tech migration plan. We analyzed each and every aspect of both product platforms, ranking them against each other and criteria for each core pillar of our customer experience.
At 888, we have a long history of developing our own technology and already operated a fully proprietary system that has scaled across almost 20 regulated markets. This led us to our first major decision of the integration project, which is 888 is going to be the core platform, and we will build onto it, incorporating some of the market-leading components that we're getting from William Hill. Two of these key elements that will come from William Hill are the global trading platform that comes from William Hill, and the retail technology platform. The trading platform is a first-class, fully in-house, and offers significant benefits to enhance the current 888sport platform. We have there more markets, more capabilities, more accurate pricing, and access to a vastly experienced in-house team of traders that drive higher margins to our sports books.
Taking this key decision early about the platform was critical as it accelerates and it focuses the entire tech roadmap and also clarifies what synergies we can deliver and when we can deliver them. The first market that we will migrate over to the 888 platform will be Mr Green in Sweden in the first half of 2023, and Nir Carmeli, who's here with us, will talk to you about the benefits of that migration to the 888 platform. We're planning to complete all of the platform migrations within around two years. As we migrate to our future platforms, we get twoa significant benefits from this migration. Firstly, there's a big cost advantage, as we are no longer running parallel technology stacks, and we are leveraging our proprietary technology.
Secondly, there's a big revenue opportunity, as we're combining the best-in-class product and content across betting and gaming over all of our different brands in the group. A successful integration and migration is my number one priority. To support me with this execution of this plan, I'm delighted to say that we have just recruited Anna Barsby as the Chief Product and Technology Officer. Anna joins us with a huge experience with complex integration and migration from her past and is already making great progress with our tech colleagues from across the group. As we are creating a unified tech stack, our new business will leverage from a wide range of global functions, including customer service, payments, and digital marketing.
This model gives us a huge scale benefit, while at the same time enabling us to compete hard and cut through in our local markets. On slide 12, I'll outline an example of how the combination will allow us to improve the customer experience and also to deliver cost savings at the same time. By streamlining our operations and building out further automation, we are able to reduce the number of times that customer need to contact us. When they do still need to contact us, we can deal with their request more quickly and turn this into a positive experience. These better customer experiences help us drive ongoing improvement in our customer satisfaction or net promoter score.
This is increases our customer retention, it drives higher LTVs, and it increases our brand recommendation between the customers and their friends, which also results in lower CPAs. I won't walk you through all of the statistics on this pages. What I will say is that we know that we can provide a much better customer service, and we know that we can do this at a much lower combined cost base for the organization. Our integration plan will follow the same roadmap that William Hill has followed for the last couple of years in terms of customer support. Firstly, using more automation in order to increase speed, this is critical. Improved customer experience and drive cost savings.
For example, the state-of-the-art chatbot handles the equivalent of 40 members of staff per day, freeing up our colleagues to deal with the higher value services and save costs in the same time. Secondly, consolidating customer services centers to drive capability concentration and economies of scale in our customer support functions. Thirdly, unifying back office systems so all brands globally can be served off one platform. This combination is all about better customer service experiences at a lower cost of production. This is just one example of the benefits of the scale of this combination. On the next slide, I'll outline how the combination will also drive revenue growth for us.
Just before that, I wanna share with you a short video that shows how effective our chatbot is with dealing with high volume requests like identity verification and event cancellations, which are two events that happen to us as a business from time to time. As you saw, our scale benefits will drive better customer services at a lower cost. Our plans are not just about cost cutting. There's huge competitive advantages that we are strengthening in the group, and these support our revenue growth plans. On slide 14, there are just a few examples of the revenue growth opportunities that we've identified from this combination. Starting within sports, William Hill trades over 50,000 more in-play football markets each year than 888sport.
Expanding the range of the options at 888sport and reducing the in-play suspension through using our in-house algorithms will drive higher engagement and revenue with our 888sport customers. On the gaming side, we're fortunate to have one of the best in-house casino game studios, which is Section 8, which will also be available to William Hill and Mr Green customers next year. Section 8 is the second-largest content provider to the 888casino out of more than 50 global providers, and it represents over 20% of the RNG revenue outside of live casino in 888casino. Integrating this into William Hill will enable millions more of players to access these best-in-class games, driving both revenue upside but also reducing our third-party costs at the same time.
At 888, we also have advanced data science and AI capabilities to optimize the gaming journey and offer the most relevant content to players. Think of this like a an Amazon or a Netflix from a player's early activity. We know exactly what the games that they are likely to enjoy. We bring these games in front of the players at the appropriate time and in the appropriate place in their customer journey. We're not the only ones who do this, of course. As you can see from the slide here, that our in-house developed models consistently outperform the best third-party models you can buy. That's all due to the great data science and algorithm building capabilities that we have in-house.
While we're focused on integration and synergies, that doesn't mean that we're stopping with our product innovation initiatives in the group. On the slide, you can see an example of a new product that we launched recently, our Daily Wish Wheel. Each day, players gets a free spin on the wheel and can win either free spins, cash, or other prizes. This really supports our recreational play strategy, player strategy and offer our customers another layer of engagement and excitement on a daily basis. This wheel is also hosted by one of the most popular Section 8 characters, Millionaire Genie, who's supposed to be on the screen. Millionaire Genie is really a smash hit series that people can only play on 888casino.
We have three great slots, including a megaways slot version and a scratch card version with more games under the venture on the way soon. These are all developed by our great Inhouse Studio, and they outperform games from across all of the world and all of the different big studios that they're competing with on the 888 platform. Our Millionaire Genie wheel gives players a reason to come back to us every day, but it's also a reminder of our unique high-quality games, all of which will soon be available for both William Hill and Mr Green. Turning to slide 16 and just to summarize my focuses and priority. The strong strategic rationale of the deal is unchanged.
Our combined scale will give us more capabilities at a lower cost of production, and we'll have leading brands to outcompete in our focus markets. However, we know we're facing some significant near-term challenges. We have a significant amount of debt, deleveraging is top priority for the group. We also know we have a very solid plan and strong business to face these challenges and realize our potential. We're going to do this through a clear strategic priorities of integration and market focus. This will drive superior shareholder value creation. As we execute on our plan, this will unlock huge future growth potential. We are going to build a stronger, unified business with an improved balance sheet. As we spoke a lot about the importance of deleveraging, I'm now going to hand over to Yariv to discuss what the plan looks like from a financial perspective.
Yariv, over to you.
Thanks, Itai. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Yariv Dafna, the CFO of the company. I've been with the business now, two years. Itai had just given you an overview of our position, our plan, and the potential that we are building as a business. In my section today, I will expand on our financial framework and how our plan will deliver superior shareholder returns. Let's start with slide 18. Our enterprise value today is about GBP 2.2 billion, made up of approximately GBP 1.7 billion of net debt and approximately GBP 460 million of equity. This is a position where our net debt is high and above our midterm target of 3x net debt to EBITDA. We have a clear plan to grow the equity value of our company through focus on integration and building more profitable and efficient business.
From finance perspective, the top priority in our plan is deleveraging. In the near term, this will be driven by improved EBITDA, but in the next few years, our disciplined capital allocation model will also prioritize debt reduction over any other opportunities. The combination of these will provide strong value creation potential for our shareholder. Next slide, please. A quick update on our current trading. We have seen good growth over the last couple of years with our pro forma online revenue growing from GBP 1.1 billion in 2019 to GBP 1.35 billion in the last 12 months. 2022 obviously has been a challenging year across all digital and e-commerce businesses, and we are no exception. On top of the macro challenges, we have also saw disruption from regulatory changes in some of our important market.
Despite this disruption, we are on track to deliver this year pro forma revenue, including retail of approximately GBP 1.85 billion and adjusted EBITDA of GBP 305 million-GBP 315 million. Given the performance in the first nine months, this means that we are expecting adjusted EBITDA of GBP 88 million-GBP 98 million in Q4, reflecting an EBITDA margin of about 20%. Q4 is basically the first period to reflect our more disciplined and focused cost control and the yearly benefit of some of our synergies. I will discuss more in details about the synergy in the next slide. While market conditions are challenging, I'm pleased with the progress we have made so far with the integration with improving our EBITDA margin, this puts us in a better position for 2023. Slide 20.
One of our key element of our plan to improve our profit margin is delivering synergies through the integration. As we have got stuck into the details of the integration, we have uncovered further opportunity for saving and have increased our cost synergy target from the original GBP 100 million to approximately GBP 150 million. The cash synergies of GBP 150 million includes approximately GBP 34 million of CapEx synergies resulting from our decision around the tech platform, and this means that the EBITDA benefit is approximately GBP 116 million. As well as increasing the target, we have also been able to bring forward our target, and we now expect to deliver approximately GBP 87 million of EBITDA synergies next year. The updated number give us confident in our profitability and cash generation for 2023.
As we have progressed with the synergy plan, we have been able to deliver more synergies and more quickly. On slide 21, we provide details on where these are coming from. The first major area is cost of sale, which represent the direct costs that are linked to revenues. We have completed a deep analysis of our contract with supplier and have already signed deals realizing part of these synergies. The second major area is product and technology. Itai mentioned earlier, we have made a decision that the 888 proprietary platform will be the one to host all our brands globally moving forward. This will not only drive significant cost synergies, but even more important, will also give us a world-class product and technology base that will allow us to adapt quicker to customer preferences and drive future growth once we have the unified platform.
The third major area is brand and marketing. Phil and Nir will talk later about these benefits. We now have a suite of world-class brands which enable us to be more selective when it comes to how and where we invest in various markets. We are also shifting our marketing spend to use brands with, within each market in the most effective way and building a single unified marketing service group. This will enable us to both enhance the ROI on each market and also deploy the marketing spend more efficiently. Finally, this is also Itai were discussing about this, we are really focused on delivering our customer excellence plan. We can improve customer service and reduce costs at the same time as we realize the benefit of our new global shared services. Next slide to talk about our focus on profitability.
Delivering our synergies is one of the key element that underpins our plan to improve profit margin. We are also focused on cost efficiency in more in general. In this slide, I give an idea about of our current cost base and where we expect it to land in few years once we deliver on our plans. We split our P&L, as you can see in the left-hand side, into three main cost line: cost of sale, marketing, and overhead or other operating costs. Within cost of sale, we plan to drive down cost by around two points as we execute our plan to streamline our supplier and optimize our operating structure. This will reflect future gross margin of 69%-70%. Within marketing, we plan to reduce our marketing ratio by 3 to 4 points to 16%-17% of revenue.
We will benefit from removing inefficient marketing spend where our brand are currently competing against each other and will also enjoy the benefit of our centralized brand and marketing functions. Within other operating costs, we plan to reduce our cost by two to three points as we benefit from our unified tech stack and simplified operation. Overall, this plan, as you can see from the right-hand side, deliver adjusted EBITDA margin that are seven to nine points higher, and this can explain why we are targeting a group margin of more than 23% by 2025. Next slide, I will provide more details about the retail.
The retail segment generates strong cash flow, and as you can see on the left-hand side, it is performing well post-COVID and generating even more revenue per shop than it did in 2019. Retail is also a highly optimized estate with quite flexible leases and an excellent property management team who are able to adapt to the changing real estate market conditions. We have seen a nice discount on leases that have been renegotiated this year that help us in the short term when we face external costs going up due to the inflation by more than GBP 15 million. Retail is a strong cash generator for us with a significant benefit to our U.K. operation, and Phil will expand further on that later today. Slide 24. My top priority as a CFO is deleveraging our balance sheet.
Our position today is gross debt of GBP 1.8 billion, with approximately 64% floating rate and 36% fixed. We have a hedging plan in place. We will look for at least 50% of our debt to be at fixed rate as soon as possible. Recent reduction in the reference rate and the forward curves have benefited our 2023 outlook. We now expect the total cost of interest to be approximately GBP 165 million, slightly down from the GBP 170 million that we indicated as part of our Q3 trading update. Our plan are built around strong equity growth framework. In this slide, we outline how our action will drive high shareholder return. Our evolved focus on key market opportunity where we have real competitive advantages will unlock clear revenue growth potential beyond 2023.
Every one point in revenue growth is worth approximately GBP one to our adjusted EPS. Our simplified operating model and unified tech stack will support the EBITDA margin expansion. Every one point in EBITDA margin is worth approximately GBP three to our adjusted EPS. Our cash flow management and prioritization of debt reduction will drive reduced debt from 2024 and on. Every GBP 100 million debt reduction is worth approximately GBP two to our adjusted EPS. Our commitment toward deleveraging should also provide us with future opportunity to optimize the cost of the debt. Every one percentage point to our cost of debt is worth approximately GBP three to our adjusted EPS. In this slide, you can see our clear plan for coming for the coming years that will unlock the potential of the enlarged business. This enable us to set today the following target for 2025.
One, have revenue of over GBP two billion. Two, have an adjusted EBITDA margin of over 23%. Three, reduce our leverage below 3.5x net debt to EBITDA. Four, deliver adjusted EPS of at least GBP 35 . Throughout the day, you will hear how we are going to achieve all these targets. For the analysts in the room, I would like to note a few item to help you with the modeling of 2023. I will not go through everything you have in the appendix in the presentation that provide all the details, but I will mention really the important stuff. We expect EBITDA margin of at least 20% in 2023. This is up from 15.8% in the last 12 months to June 2022.
The action that we took to rationalize the cost also affect the CapEx, we expect now GBP 90 million in 2023, down from approximately GBP 135 million in the last 12 months to June 2022. We are already running at a EBITDA margin of almost 20% in Q4 this year, we have good visibility and confidence in achieving the at least 20% EBITDA in 2023 and moving up toward more than 23% in 2025. Next slide to summarize basically the finance section. Our current position is a newly combined business with high leverage. Our plan is to grow the value of our business through improved profitability and a focus on the market share gains in our key markets. I will ensure that we are really disciplined with our capital allocation, prioritizing debt reduction.
Our plan will deliver superior shareholder returns and rapid EPS growth with a target of at least GBP 35 of adjusted EPS by 2025. As I have outlined, we have a clear plan in place that will drive profitability and deleveraging. I will now hand over to Vaughan, our CSO, who will take us through the strategy and how we focus our investment.
Thanks. Great. Thanks, Yariv. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Vaughan, the Chief Strategy Officer at 888. Over the next 10 minutes or so, I'm going to be talking about our strategy, which is largely where we're growing and how we're going to deliver that growth. I'm starting on slide 29 with an overview of our strategic framework.
I think Yariv and Itai couldn't have been any clearer about the goals and the priorities here. We're gonna grow EPS growth and we're gonna deleverage the business. Those are number one, number two priorities. I'm often asked what is a chief strategy officer and what do I do? Sometimes by my teammates here. In the context of our business, look, we have a amazing global platform and brands. We can operate almost anywhere and we can operate our brands and products in almost any country. When I think about strategy, it's about helping our business leaders here really focus on where we can invest our money the most profitably, where we can create the most value, and how we can drive real prioritization.
This means that we're then spending our time, our team's time and our resources where we can generate the highest long-term returns. That's what, that's what it's all about. Shortly I'll run through our market priorities. In these markets, we've got a really clear plan to grow market share and the competitive advantages that we have to drive market share growth are these three key enablers here. Product and content leadership, world-class brands and customer excellence. Phil and Nir will talk about how we're putting those into practice in both our U.K. segment and our international segment and you'll hear a bit more about that after this. The critical foundations that underpin that are also important.
These are our people. You saw from the video with Itai how engaged our teams are. That's all about providing a diverse and inclusive workplace with growth potential. Player safety and players and customer excellence is key to our plans. After this, Harinder will explain more about our safer gambling plans. We're committed to doing our bit for the planet and combating climate change. Turning to the next slide, this is before I talk about where we're going to win. This is really a, an outline of the main strategic challenges that we face into as a, as a business. What you can see on the screen here are four of the most important challenges that we face, I would say. Firstly, regulatory change.
Everyone knows about how challenging regulations are in this industry, but they're not just a challenge for us. You know, as standards rise, barriers to entries rise and those operators that have market leading positions and capabilities are in a really strong position to succeed and benefit from that. M&A, we've seen a lot of benefits from M&A over recent years. Today is really all about how we're going to unlock the benefits from our combination. Channel shift and maturity. The U.K. is our biggest market. Around 60% of gambling is already online in the U.K.. We do expect growth to slow in the U.K., but there is huge growth potential in other markets. Today in our strategy is really about how we position our business to benefit from both of those trends. Finally, ESG.
Customers, regulators, broader society are much more engaged in safer gambling now. Our people need really clear growth plans, need a diverse and inclusive workplace, and it's also important that we play our part in addressing the climate crisis. Today is really all about underpinning how our plans will ensure that our business is best placed to benefit from these trends and emerge as a real global leader. Turning to slide 31, and I'm gonna talk about where we're focused on growing. We have a really disciplined and data-led approach to ensure that we spend our time and our money or your money as shareholders on the right markets. We call it our market consideration framework. We use it to group all of our countries into these four archetypes. Firstly, our core markets.
These make up around 70% of our online revenues, so the U.K., Italy, Spain. The addressable market here is around GBP 10 billion and we've already got more than 10% market share in these markets. A great position. We're focused on building our market share through delivering our competitive advantages and these are all markets with tightening regulations and rising barriers to entry. As we build on our market share, we build really attractive long-term sustainable profit centers. Second group is our growth markets. This is a small group of markets that make up around 10% of our online revenues. These are all regulated markets but they're less mature than our core markets and we have the opportunity to grow really rapidly here through disrupting these markets.
We've got strong initial positions and our focus here is on growth, so we will reinvest all of our underlying profitability to drive that growth and operate this group at around break-even. The third group we call our optimized markets. As we have a global and scalable platform, we can offer our products in a huge range of markets profitably in both regulated and offshore markets. These are markets where right now either the market opportunity doesn't excite us enough or we don't have the local knowledge, the brands, the capabilities to cut through and become a top-three player. Our main focus in these markets is to drive profitability, to offer our products and services in a really cost-efficient manner and get the benefits of our scalable business model. Finally on the far right we have our pipeline markets.
These are markets or opportunities or regions where there's a really attractive growth opportunity but we need a different model to unlock that opportunity. The best example of that is Africa and I'm gonna be talking about that on the next page. All of our core growth and pipeline markets are locally regulated, and this really drives our long-term sustainable growth plans. Our growth markets will become our core markets of the future with high and sustainable profits from market-leading positions. We have a whole bunch of countries in our optimized group that are battling to become growth markets of the future and get the increased investment and focus required to do that. Later today, Nir will talk a bit about Sweden and how that has the potential to become a growth market.
We've got a market-leading brand already with Mr Green, and as we migrate over to the 888 platform, we will add the product and content leadership and have that combination of assets that could become a future growth market. On the next page, as I mentioned, a few words on Africa. Africa is a great example of our pipeline markets and how we're thinking about those. It's a region with huge growth potential, but one where we need a different model to address this. It's a different type of product, and you need real local focus to access these markets. To address this and make sure that we're taking advantage of that strong opportunity, we created a new entity called 888 Africa, where we partnered with a highly experienced and entrepreneurial team which is focused on driving growth just in this region.
Having set up the business in March, we moved quickly to launch within four countries by September. As you can see in the charts on the bottom left, we're seeing really strong growth in actives and stakes in just the first few weeks of operations. The key to this is our focus on localization. On the far right-hand side, you can see our Dabo Dabo promotion, which is one of the headline promotions in Tanzania. This really resonates with local audiences in an authentic way and is done on the ground with really low cost with influencers. This is a promotion where for every bet you make, you get opted into a draw, and then there are live draws on TV. You can win money, you can win motorbikes, you can win fridge freezers, you can win TVs.
This is a really popular local promotion that really resonates with that audience. In the middle is one of our World Cup promotions. The campaigns here have used our insight, our competitive knowledge of our markets to really build brand awareness and do that through low-cost and high-reach local channels. It is still early days in here, as you can see. We launched in September. We're two months in, but we've been really pleased with the progress we've seen here. We've entertained over 50,000 customers already in Africa, and we're really confident that we'll build leading positions in our chosen markets, and this will deliver really strong shareholder value. Turning to slide 33 and a few words about our evolved plan for the USA.
It's no surprise that the USA is one of the most attractive growth opportunities out there. As everyone knows, it is also intensely competitive. Our original plan here was to build a nationwide sports-led operation in 12-15 states. It's become clear to us that the intense competition in sports betting and the dominance of the top four brands means that it'll be very difficult to deliver positive returns without evolving our plan. With just over a year of operations under our belt with the Sports Illustrated Sportsbook brand, we now have really clear data about how we can convert players, what they play, what makes them stay, what are the different values between the different cohorts, and that data gives us real confidence in our evolved plan. Our evolved plan is called Betting 2.0, going deeper and leveraging our key assets.
This is all about bringing Sports Illustrated to our players, news and content, and then really focusing on being laser-focused on a key cohort of the older male demographic. As you can see on the bottom right, older male demographic are worth more. They spend four to six times more than the ultra-competitive younger demographics, and they also love casino. These are players that are older and male, they love betting, they love casino, and I feel like I know quite a lot about this, and we call it the unsexy sweet spot. Our plan also focuses much more on casino and iGaming. The iGaming market is almost as big as the sports market in the U.S., even though gaming's only in six states and sports is live in 22 states.
888casino is also probably the best online casino in the world, so we have huge competitive advantages to disrupt these states. The USA is an important market for us. It's certainly one of our growth markets, but importantly, it's part of a portfolio of growth markets that are competing for investment with each other. Across that portfolio of growth markets, we will operate at around break- even. While we continue to invest with confidence in the U.S., we are going to deliver positive returns by really focusing on what we are good at and where our brand cuts through. Turning to slide 34 and to wrap up this section. There's often a lot of negativity around the gambling industry. People focus on regulatory changes, recession, whatever it might be.
Look, this is an industry I've been in and around on the finance side and operator side for 20 years. It's a fantastic industry, and we've built a business with leading positions across some of the most attractive countries in the world with amazing brands and great technology. Great industry. I love it. I'm a massive betting and gaming fan. I've used all of the competing brands, and I can tell you from experience that 888 and William Hill are amongst the best products out there. We've got great brands, great products, and it is still a really attractive industry with huge growth potential.
There's still loads of consolidation to come. That will create value for the leading operators and the leading businesses in this industry. What you've heard today from Itai and Yariv, what we'll outline for the rest of the day, is a really clear plan that puts us in a position to ensure that we're one of the long-term winners in this industry. While we're executing that plan, I think the priority on deleverage couldn't have been clearer, we will still be topping up our future potential pipeline, so that we've got a strong runway of future growth opportunities, once we've reached our deleverage targets. I'm now pleased to hand over to Harinder, who's gonna talk through our player safety plans and how important that is in terms of our long-term sustainable growth plans.
Thank you, Vaughan, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Harinder Gill, I recently joined the company in a new role as the Chief Risk Officer. You heard Itai speak earlier about how critical safer gambling is, this is exactly why my role was created. I oversee all areas of risk with a strong focus on safer gambling. I'm new to the industry, I'm not new to overseeing risk in a highly regulated industry. For the past 20 years, I've been operating in risk management roles in top-tier financial institutions, including 13 years at Barclays Bank, where I had various roles and positions, including have the opportunity to work in London, New York, Johannesburg, and Singapore. Most recently, I was the Global Chief Compliance Officer at Revolut.
This has given me great experience of what it takes to build a best-in-class risk and compliance function and succeeding in challenging regulatory environments in the U.K. and overseas. Turning to slide 36, this is our overall strategy framework that Vaughan just talked us through. One of the critical foundations of our plan is players and, in particular, player safety. Since joining, I've been impressed with the progress that the team have made in recent years. We have a great team, and we've got great top-quality technology capabilities. These are central to our plans to continue to reduce the risks related to player safety. However, we know that there is more to do. We are on a journey of continual improvement, enhancing our approach to risk management, improving core processes, integrating teams, and managing a bigger and more complex organization.
Turning to slide 37, this is a snapshot of our business and where we operate and where we operate in regulated markets. Our focus as a business is to build leading positions in some of the most attractive regulated betting and gaming markets in the world. As Vaughan just outlined, our core markets and growth markets are all locally regulated. As you can see on the right-hand side, this focus is demonstrated with a mix of our revenues from locally regulated markets consistently increasing over recent years. This reflects two key points. Firstly, more of the markets in which we service players have regulated. Secondly, we've been able to grow significantly within those markets that are already regulated. Providing high safer gambling standards is one of our key principles and underpins our growth ambitions.
We know that both William Hill and 888 have not always been good enough in two important areas in the past. Firstly, the policies that underpin safer gambling have historically, at times, been too lenient. Secondly, the processes to implement these policies have not always been sufficiently robust. A lot of progress has been made in the last few years. Since starting, my focus has been to understand both our policies and processes and continue improving these. I believe we're making good progress, and it's clear that across the business there's an incredible drive to build strong player controls to significantly reduce the risk of players encountering harm from gambling. Turning to slide 38. We are building a company culture and working practices where safer gambling is central to the customer experience and at the heart of everything we do.
The risk and compliance team has more than doubled in size across the group in the last three years, which includes the U.K. and international markets, for which we have almost 400 employees. It is one of the largest teams in the business, reflecting just how important it is. The team is well-positioned to meet changing requirements and expectations, and we are well-positioned to scale the existing team and their experience to support the business in achieving its future ambitions. If you look at the group today, our position is that we have three separate platforms, each with slightly different approaches to safer gambling. Our plan is to drive a consistent journey of continuous improvement. We will unify our policies and processes to drive higher standards across the business.
We are collaborating across the industry and with external stakeholders to build a deeper understanding about the root causes of harm and how we can use our technology to intervene at the right time to reduce risks. We have already made significant investments in safer gambling technology across the group, both in customer-facing tools and background monitoring systems. The technology used in the background is key to keeping players safe. It is processing all transactions in real time to understand player behaviors and triggering alerts and warnings where appropriate. On the customer-facing front, we have 888's Control Centre product, which gives players transparent insight into their play through intuitively presented real-time data. It also provides easy access to a range of safer gambling tools. Furthermore, we have a clear and easy-to-use profit and loss tool that has been developed by William Hill.
All of this gives us great data and insight into what customers interact with, what works and what doesn't. We will continue to innovate, we will continue to learn, and we will continue to improve. Right now, we're working through all of these tools and customer insights to understand how we can best utilize and improve our existing tools, as well as how we can better develop our new technology. We continue to strive to use technology as a force for good, leveraging our data and AI capabilities to personalize player safety. Turning to slide 39, to wrap up this section. We are in a position today where we have dramatically improved our safer gambling policies and processes in recent years. Safer gambling is now truly at the heart of what we do.
However, we do have some alignment work to do between brands to ensure we're operating optimally and with the most robust policies and processes across the business. Our plan is to make safer gambling a normal part of the customer experience. We strive to build seamless and frictionless customer journeys that enable players to easily track their spend and, where necessary, stop spending while also enabling us as the operator to step in when there is a risk of harm. Our potential is an even more trusted relationship with our players who know that they can enjoy their betting and gaming with us in a safe and sustainable manner. I look forward to telling you a lot more about this critical area and our progress in the future.
Now I'm gonna hand over to Phil to tell you more about how we're set up for success in our most important market, the U.K..
Thanks, Harinder. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Phil Walker, and I'm the managing director of the U.K. and Ireland division. I've been in the industry for about 13 years, after holding similar positions for Ladbrokes Coral. Here at 888, I'm responsible for the P&L of our U.K. business, and I run all of the group brands in the U.K. and Ireland, and I leverage a range of group services that Itai mentioned earlier around product and content, payments, customer services, and digital marketing. Starting on slide 41, we show what a strong position we have in the U.K. today. In retail, William Hill is the number two operator with about 23% share of the market.
Having over 1,350 shops gives us a huge competitive advantage, building brand presence, maintaining trust, and giving us tangible points to interact with our customers. They are also great cash generators. Our market share of revenue is slightly higher than our share of shops as we have a higher revenue per shop than most other major operators. In online, we have one of the leading sportsbook brands and two of the leading gaming brands, with a 13% market share of the total online betting and gaming market. One of the real benefits of the combination, though, is going to be our ability to drive market share gains through increased share of wallet. Both William Hill and 888 have very high brand awareness and already have a relationship with a large number of U.K. customers.
Our goal here is to continuously improve our product and customer experience so that we become the number one choice for our customers, and they choose to spend more of their money with us. This also supports sustainable growth as customers aren't spending any more on gambling overall, just more of it with us. With the unique brand assets we have, we will also be able to tailor our brands to different segments, making them the go-to choice for a wide range of audiences. Over the next few slides, I'll expand a little more on how we plan to leverage our competitive advantages to do this. First, if we turn to slide 42, I want to address upfront some clear challenges we are facing in the U.K. in the short term. The first is the macroeconomic environment.
There's no hiding the fact that we are likely to be in recession across the near term. Our customers are facing high inflation and a squeeze on the cost of living. You can see from the chart on the left that overall U.K. gambling spend was fairly resilient versus the decline in discretionary income in the last major recession. Given that we have a more recreational customer base now and our products are low-cost entertainment, with the average bet size online of GBP 16 and just GBP 12 in retail and an average stake per spin on slots of just GBP 0.62 online and GBP 0.91 in retail, we feel that we are well-positioned to face into the challenge across the U.K. business.
We are, of course, also facing potential changes in regulation with the government planning to introduce a white paper to set the framework for future regulation in our industry. Our business and the leading operators across the market have made huge progress in addressing the concerns of society, politicians, and the regulator in recent years. We are using our technology to detect signs of gambling harm and intervene increasingly early, as Harinder explained earlier. As well as using our technology, we have set much stricter limits across different customer groups. Now, while we believe that a personalized approach through technology is ultimately the ideal of protection without penalizing those who are simply enjoying a bet, we do recognize that for some customers, these limits can and do prevent problems from escalating.
As an example, we have introduced background financial vulnerability checks from GBP 500 of net loss, additional affordability thresholds, and reduced the maximum stakes on all of our online slots to just GBP 10 across all of our brands in the U.K. market. These types of interventions and limits have impacted our combined U.K. revenue substantially and will continue to impact into 2023 as the full year annualization of all the measures takes effect and further measures are introduced. We know that this is the right thing to do and is helping to build a more powerful, sustainable business and is improving customer trust. We are confident this will help us in the long term to become the brand of choice for even more online customers in the U.K.
As you heard from Vaughan, our plan is to grow market share in the U.K. by leveraging our three competitive advantages: product and content leadership, world-class brands, and customer excellence. I'm sure you've all downloaded the William Hill app, after it I told you about tonight's football offer, but in case you haven't, I'll give you a flavor of some of the exciting developments that we've made so far this year and some of the potential we will see from combining our platforms. Perhaps the best example of our really strong innovation is our William Hill Bet Builder product, Build Your Odds. Enabling customers to track their bets is a really important part of the customer experience, and our players can now see the status of each individual leg in real time and whether it is winning or losing.
As well as being a great way to follow the action, it also allows our customers to take informed actions, such as cashing out. We also allow customers to boost or ensure their odds pre-match, which increases value perception and improves customer engagement. All of this is right inside the bet slip in your William Hill app. On the William Hill Gaming side, we've developed a proprietary real-time promotions framework, which enables interactions with our gaming players across all game providers. This drives engagement for customers and enhances their entertainment experience. We've also made the whole gaming experience more personal and relevant for our customers with targeted games content in the lobby, which has improved customer experience, value perception, and player retention.
As Itai mentioned earlier, within the 888 gaming space, we have upgraded our core platform and significantly increased speed, introduced our in-house AI recommendation engine, and enabled higher levels of customization to further improve the customer experience. We have also heavily invested in ensuring we have the best content available on the platform, and we'll have 2,800 games available by the end of this year. I'm particularly proud that nearly 40% of our top 20 slots are in-house games developed by our Section 8 Studio, and I look forward to introducing that top-class content onto the William Hill platform very soon. That really is one of the major benefits of the combination and moving to a unified platform that I'm most excited about.
The ability to share the best of both across sports and gaming with customer experience across all our brands being improved as a result. Last but by no means least, we have invested heavily in tools and features to improve player safety. As Itai and Harinder both mentioned, these improvements include a smart profit and loss tool, improved player risk algorithms, our unique Control Centre product, and a best-in-class player help center. Turning to slide 44. Our second sustainable competitive advantage is our world-class brands and marketing capabilities. As you've heard earlier, we have a range of powerful brands in the U.K. market, that enables us to maximize the ROI on our marketing spend.
You heard Yariv talk earlier about synergies, optimizing marketing spend is one of the areas where we can deliver meaningful results quickly by investing in the brands with the highest returns and targeting our marketing activity to the customers who will find us most attractive. For example, with our William Hill Epic Odds offer, we are providing great value boosts in football, which is the fastest-growing part of the U.K. market. Combined with our leading Build #YourOdds product and leveraging the fantastic heritage that William Hill has built up in football and racing over the last 80 years, we can continue to be the home of football betting for U.K. customers.
For gaming players, we have the higher-end casino-led 888casino with its market-leading live casino offering, which we can promote to a different audience than William Hill Vegas, which is a compelling all-round proposition available online and in shops that focuses on mass-market recreational entertainment. We really do have something for everyone in U.K. gaming. Turning to slide 45, customer excellence underpins our whole philosophy. Understanding our customers, understanding what they want, what they don't like, and how we can engage them and create great experiences for everyone. One of the real focus areas in William Hill over the last 18 months has been user journeys, looking at the basic things that players do the most and making sure that they have a top-quality experience from start to finish. This could be resetting your password, depositing and betting, tracking your bets, or changing player safety limits.
Understanding the flow of all these journeys, testing different options with our customers through deep insight and A/B testing, and making them as seamless as possible. We call this concept Brilliant Basics, and we've made huge improvements across both William Hill and 888 brands over the last 12 months. You can see from the chart on the bottom left that this has led to a significant increase in the amount of days that players spend with us as we become the preferred brand for more of our players. Now, as you heard the headline financial numbers that Yariv shared earlier, people are spending less overall, but we're encouraged that they're choosing to do more of their betting and gaming with us. Itai talked about the improvement in customer service we've seen that has delivered a strong improvement in NPS since the start of 2020.
Again, there is more that we can do here as a combined business with a focus on quicker contact resolution, deep insight, market-leading chatbots, and continually improving the customer journeys. Getting the basics right and improving our customer service drives higher retention and player value and makes our marketing more efficient as our brand strength improves. In other words, we retain more customers that are worth more and can acquire more valuable customers more cheaply. Turning to slide 46 and onto our retail business, where the William Hill brand has been leading the sports betting industry for over 80 years. In retail, we have a similar philosophy to beat the competition through product and content, colleague excellence, and a clear focus on customer experience.
We launch our new industry-leading gaming platform from December this year, and you can see an example of our new machines on the left. With unique content, software, features, and cabinets, we will have the strongest offer on the high street. As I mentioned before, our market share of revenue is higher than our share of shops, but we have been stronger in sports than gaming. Investing in this best-in-class gaming offering will help us deliver growth in retail gaming as we roll out those new machines over the whole estate in the next 18 months. On the betting side, we have further developed our own proprietary self-service betting terminals with new features completed ahead of the World Cup, and you can see this terminal second on the left.
For those who haven't been into a shop recently, these are really intuitive touchscreen systems that allow customers to find and place bets really simply, a bit like the ordering system in McDonald's. Another important investment this year has been the completion of our new Epos Smart Hub till system, which is the third picture here. For the first time, this allows customers to enjoy the full range of betting markets when placing a bet with one of our colleagues over the counter. Finally, on the right is a picture of one of our new Shop of the Future shops in Leeds. I'm very proud of what we've been able to create, and if you get a chance to take a look at the video of our new shops over drinks later, I'm sure you'll agree they are a major step forward in U.K. retail.
Looking into 2023, we will continue to innovate even further with a range of technology and customer experience trials taking place. These trials include footfall trackers, gantry cameras to inform us about how our customers enjoy our market-leading broadcast content, and racing form and statistics embedded into small form factor research units for the first time. As Yariv's slides showed, we've invested over GBP 20 million in CapEx in retail over the last 12 months, which will deliver strong returns in 2023 and beyond. Turning to slide 47. One of the greatest assets is the brand power that our U.K. retail estate provides. The William Hill brand is a huge asset and instantly recognizable up and down high streets across the country. With our nationwide coverage, we have the ability to interact with millions of customers every day.
We have installed digital display screens across about one in five of our shops, where we can deliver dynamic and localized content for the first time. That content includes not only retail promotions and information but can be used to support acquisition for our online businesses too. We have also extended our reach during 2022, bringing our retail betting experience to 36 race courses in the U.K. The benefit this brings was best illustrated during the Cheltenham and Aintree festivals this year, where we attracted over a million on-course searches for williamhill.com, as well as taking some really good business on the tracks. Turning to slide 48, customer excellence is our third sustainable competitive advantage. When we look at the retail customer base, there are really two main factors that drive business. Firstly, location, and secondly, the quality of our colleagues in shop.
We did a huge amount of work over the last three years to ensure that our estate is in the best possible locations. While we have significantly reduced our shop numbers, we now have a really optimized estate that is highly profitable with excellent geographic coverage. Really, it's our shop teams that make the difference. Our colleagues are amazing at promoting our brand values and ensuring that customers have a great experience with us. We know that leading the market when it comes to speed of service and having friendly and knowledgeable colleagues continues to be the most important reason customers choose to bet with William Hill. Now, while many of those customers are retail loyalists and only bet in retail, we have an increasing number of omnichannel customers who bet both online and in-shop.
The experience for these omnichannel customers has been constantly improving since we created the U.K. team in September 2020. With the combination of our new Smart Hub Epos system and rolling out Epic Odds from online into retail, we have seen a strong improvement in online account registrations in-shop. We're also gonna enhance the omnichannel experience further through things like being able to verify your documents in your local shop for online accounts or using our shop colleagues to help answer online customer queries. These are just some of the ways that we're using our shops and online together to enhance the overall customer experience. Turning to slide 49, and to sum up my section, the U.K. market is incredibly important to the group, and while there are short-term challenges, it remains one of the world's biggest and most attractive markets.
We have a leading position in this market, and now with the combination of William Hill and 888 brands, we have a huge potential to grow share with a clear focus on product and customer excellence, leveraging the enhanced capabilities from the rest of the business. Our retail estate is a really attractive asset that not only delivers strong cash flow and ROI, but also supports market share gains in the online market. I'm really excited about the potential in the U.K., and I'm really confident about our plans to grow share in one of the largest betting and gaming markets in the world. I'm now gonna hand over to Nir, who's gonna run through the plans for our international division.
Good afternoon, everybody. Very glad to be here today. My name is Nir Hakarmeli. I'm the Managing Director for the International Business for the group. Again, very excited to be here today with you. In the next 10 minutes or so, I'm going to share with you what are my plans for the international team. We'll give you a couple of examples of how the strategy, the market focus strategy that Vaughan and Itai mentioned are going to be brought into life in the international business. Turning into slide 51, we'll start with an overview of the international business as it is today. As you can see on the left side, we have a very strong market share in many of the most attractive markets that we currently have, the regulated markets.
With Italy, in Italy, we have 6% market share, in Spain and Denmark, double-digit market share, as well as a strong presence in markets like Canada, Sweden, Germany, and Romania. As you can see on the bottom left, we also have strong brand awareness in many markets by by more than one brands. In other markets, for example, if you look at Canada or Romania, we have one single brand that is dominating, is going to take the lead, and this is going to be reflected in our strategy. Moving to the right side, sorry. This is a snapshot of what are the two main pillars of our strategy for the international business. You can see that the strategy is built on two main pillars.
The first one is relentless focus on the markets that we believe are with the highest potential to grow. As Vaughan touched it previously, we came up with, we've conducted a very thorough analysis, when we came together, looking at all our brands in all our markets and identified through a large set of metrics from financial, operational, customer, and brand metrics, we identified three sets of markets: the core, growth, and optimized. Under the core for international, obviously, in addition to the U.K., under the core, we have two main markets, which are Italy and Spain, where we see both William Hill and 888 work together in a very complementary manner to target both sports and gaming segments. In those markets, we will continue to invest in product and marketing to drive growth and to drive sustainable growth in market share and profitability.
The second category of the growth markets, where we see couple of markets under this category in international, is essentially where we see an opportunity to grow through a single brand. Although in some of those markets we have more than one dominant brand, we will streamline our focus and our investment behind, primarily behind single brand in order to drive rapid growth. Two example of those ones are 888 in Ontario that launched in the regulated market earlier in the year and, again, good traction, and Mr Green in Denmark that I will touch on later on. The last part, the last category is the optimized market, where we're looking to drive high ROI and high margin. I think Vaughan touched on Sweden, maybe a word on that one. Obviously, Mr Green was born and raised in Sweden.
this is currently not a growth market for us simply because despite a very high brand awareness and very high net promoter score, we do recognize that we need to put the right product behind it. Therefore, we are prioritizing the integration of Mr Green brands into the 888 platform as the first priority, and we will be looking on the back of the enablers that the platform will give us to add Sweden back to the growth category. Clear focus on strategy for each of those markets. This is the first pillar. The second pillar in the strategy is how we're going to win and how we're going to leverage our competitive advantage in three main areas.
One is the world-class brands that are going to differentiate ourself and differentiate the experience that we are giving to our customers in each of our markets. The second one is product and content leadership, where I personally see as the biggest opportunity that we have, looking at, you know, the best-in-class platform that we've built in 888 with great not only casino capabilities, but also very advanced marketing and ad tech capabilities. This is one of the opportunities that I will touch on in the next slide. The last one is customer excellence, where we are looking to optimize the customer journeys and with clear emphasis on localization and understanding of the customer needs and to tailor our different player journeys into what the market and the customer needs.
We already implemented quite successfully a similar process that we call customer experience squads, small tactical teams that are working in our key markets to really deliver improvements in fast-paced, short cycle, and we see almost instantly the impact on customer retention and satisfaction. All of those three elements, empowered by localized operating model and enhanced by the integration, are going to allow us to win in the focus markets, in the core and growth markets for us. Moving on to the next slide. I'm on slide 52. I would like to give you 2 examples of how we're going to implement the strategy in our core and growth markets. We will start with Denmark as one of our key growth markets, and how we are going to elevate the market-leading brand with enhanced products.
Mr Green is already well-established brand in the market. Over 10% market share, top three in terms of the market position, and great brand awareness. This is a brand that we've built over the past few years by a very, very strong leadership team with a vast localized knowledge and great access to both offline and online and digital marketing channels. We're seeing significant growth in this market and again, great retention and customer satisfaction. By integrating Mr Green into the 888 platform, we're going to almost immediately unlock great product enablers that will give us access to superior app, promotional engagement tools, and a lot of other marketing tools that are going to elevate our proposition and improve the return on investment.
We're going to get access to Sorry, to over 1,000 games available in the market, in the region in generally, and access to over 150 in-house exclusive games developed by Section 8, whether it's slots, exclusive jackpots, table and card games, all are going to enrich our portfolio in the market. All of this is going to be also enhanced by fully automated AI-driven recommendation. AI is a buzzword, I know, but what I've seen in the past, in the past few months, that was built and already fully optimized and operated on the 888 platform, is a real, I would say, market leader tool.
You can see in the bottom chart some of the results that we're seeing since this tool was implemented and optimized with 10% increase in bets per players, almost 10% increase in revenue per player. This is something, again, that is going to give us a lot of leverage to enhance our proposition in the market. This is one example of how to elevate a already market-leading brand by product enhancement, and I'm confident that this plan is going to really deliver the continuous growth in the market.
Moving on to the next slide is going to be my second example, which is how we're going to approach a core market like Italy, where we have two primary brands, William Hill targeting sports customers primarily, and 888 targeting casino customers or gaming customers. Both are leading in their category. How we're going to grow share through enhanced sports betting and gaming experience across the brands. Here I would like to put the focus on what are we doing with the teams. We are structuring the teams around those core and growth markets. By doing it, we already see great value in sharing best practices and, you know, looking at a lot of data and to identify the opportunities and to act on those opportunities in those markets. I've mentioned here three elements.
One is the brand and marketing, where local expertise in marketing are sitting and going to sit together under one organic team and driving the growth of both brands and obviously share best practices. As well as I wanted to mention here some of the digital assets opportunities that we have. For example, when it comes to SEO ranking, I think a huge amount of work has been implemented both on the product and the knowledge and the know-how. And you can see here the very high ranking of 888 on casino keywords, and those are the things that we already started to implement across the different teams. Again, a lot of opportunity by just bringing the teams together and start to action on the knowledge sharing.
The second one is product and content leadership, where again looking at the data, we've seen some interesting opportunities. For example, if you look at the ARPU of sports customers, we are seeing that the ARPU on William Hill is 86% higher than 888. However, if you look at the ARPU of accumulate, the cumulative ARPU across the two products, gaming and sports, we see that the ARPU on the 888 brand is delivering is 60% higher, meaning indicating a lot of opportunities to either target different audience or improve cross-sell capabilities. We've invested a lot in William Hill, for example.
We've revamped our Acca Boost, one of the most popular propositions, targeting football market and customers in Italy, where we really thought about how to put the customer experience in front of mind, how to enhance the customer's experience. We've implemented again, revamp of this product in the last couple of months, and we're seeing very, very good traction. Again, looking to implement as part of the integration those product capabilities into the central platform. Lastly, on the customer excellence, I wanted to give you one example of many, and Itai touched it on his part, on the free-to-play wheel and all of the suit of games. One of the games went live in Italy in 888, a free to...
daily free-to-play offer, again, fully optimized, fully localized to the market needs. We have seen almost instantly an increase in player engagement and player retention. As you can see on the graph, since it went live mid around May this year, we're seeing very sustainable level of actives, indicating a very high engagement. Obviously, we're seeing the opt-in rate and the engagement rate constantly increasing, which give us the confidence that this is definitely the right proposition. Obviously, we're going to implement throughout, in the next few months, we're going to implement those tools across all the markets and with the platform integration across other brands as well.
This is another example, and I would like to move to the last slide, where I would like to summarize with my key messages and maybe zooming out a little bit from the two very specific examples that I gave you. To summarize it, we are coming from already a strong position with a very strong portfolio of brands in all of our core markets and growth markets. We do see the opportunity by migrating into the new platform and enhancing our product capabilities by structuring our very strong talent pool. I think we all seeing while we are progressing with the operating model, we are seeing such an amazing talent pool that we have in the business.
Bringing this talent pool together, with a very clear focus on high return from our brands using localization capabilities and brand selection. Those three elements of our plan are going to really unlock the potential that we see in the business and leveraging the scalability that we have to grow both our existing markets and our new markets in the future. With that, I would like to hand over to Itai to summarize.
Thank you, Nir, and I'd like to thank all of the executive team members that took part in the presentations today. Really great and informative presentations. Today essentially has been all about explaining our plan to deliver a streamlined higher margin business with rapid deleveraging to grow our shareholder returns. Executing this plan is our top priority, and this will build a business with huge potential for the next decade and more than that, cementing our position as one of the global leaders in the exciting and growing industry. We are excited about this opportunity and about the future of the company, and we are very confident that we can deliver our plans. With that, it's now time to take your questions.
I'm gonna ask the rest of the team that presented to join me on stage. Just if you would like to raise your hands for questions and the microphones will come over to you. For the people who are online, you can put your questions in the system, and James will read out the questions that we haven't covered here physically. I'll take some of the questions and hand over to the team members, the relevant ones. Who's... Yeah, James. Where's James? James? Yeah. Ivor, please.
Hi. Thank you. Ivor Jones from Peel Hunt. Best boy band ever- -on those stools. More than once you said deleveraging was a top priority. Obviously I can see why. Is there something else you would like to be doing with cash that you cannot because of the requirement to pay down debt, or are you just indicating the importance of the debt?
Obviously, there's always a balance between growth and deleveraging. We set a clear focus that now our focus is on deleveraging and, let's say, optimizing our balance sheet better. This does come on some growth expansion plans, which we will defer to a later date.
Okay. Thank you. You talked about keeping new product development going-
Yeah.
You're migrating the bigger business off the William Hill platforms. Are you gonna launch new product development on a platform that's about to be shut down, or is NPD only on the?
Yeah.
target platform on 888, and so we have to wait for that benefit till the migration has come through?
Yeah. That's a very good question, Ivor. First of all, we are continuously developing innovation and features on the 888 platform. I gave you 1 example, which is the spin the wheel. There are several others that just came out recently. We had a really interesting feature in poker and in sports betting. We had innovation features that we recently launched, and these will continue to drive engagement with players, increase activity, and increase the value that we're getting. Indeed, in terms of where we're prioritizing the investment in product is in the target platform and not the platform that we will be migrating off. Mr Green is migrating in a few months, so obviously not investing there.
William Hill, until we get to migration, we're still supporting all the needs that we need to keep our market share in the U.K.. The customers have a great experience now on William Hill in the U.K., and we need to make sure that until we migrate them, they continue to have a great experience. We are not gonna invest heavily there in new features that will not be relevant for the future.
Okay. Last one, if I may. On, on retail, the Shop of the Future, do I need to know how much it's gonna cost? Are there going to be 1,350 of them?
That's a very good question.
Thank you.
that I will refer to Phil.
There're not gonna be 1,350 of them. We're using the two Shop of the Future concepts to trial a number of features and technology trials and experiences that we will be able to roll out relatively cheaply. We continue to invest in all of our shops or a proportion of them each year. What we'll do is roll in the best features of Shop of the Future into those, what you'd call business as usual refurbishment plans. You shouldn't expect a huge CapEx bill for thousands of Shop of the Futures. I think we can learn a lot and take the best bits and roll those out across as many shops as possible.
Thank you very much.
I'll just add a word on the product question, if I can. Having full control of the product roadmap is really critical here. I'll give you an example today. You know, Phil and Itai talked about the seven to two top price on Harry Kane to score first. I hope everyone's got a bet on that. I hope he doesn't score being Welsh, but anyway. The 888sport promotion is bet five pre-match, get a GBP five bet in-play. Now because of the technical constraints on the William Hill platform, that's a promotion that can't be used.
In the future, you know, product innovation like that enables us to really control the product, get closer to the customers, what works, engage them in multiple products, have that real cross-selling to in-play into our really quality exclusive games. You know, those are the sort of opportunities that drive a much more engaged audience and make us the brand of choice for our players. It's not about getting people to spend more overall, it's about us capturing more of their share of wallet and becoming the default home for in-play, for casino, for pre-match, for everything.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Hi, guys. David Brohan in Goodbody. Just three questions. Firstly, in terms of the SI Sportsbook, you know, you mentioned that kind of gross region would be run to break even. Can you disclose what the quantum of U.S. Losses will be, I suppose, next year or the following year? In terms of Spain, could you touch on just, you know, there's been some regulatory changes there around limiting the ability to restrict winning customers. Could you just touch on the effect that's had on your margin and maybe kind of investment decisions in Spain on the back of that? Just, you know, in light of the reduction in industry GGR in the U.K., has there been any reduction in the cost of marketing assets on the back of that? Thank you.
Okay, I hope I'll remember all three questions.
Yeah.
Uh-
I will take the losses in the U.S. In terms of losses in the U.S., we were indicating in the past about $20 million this year. This will be lower than this $20 million. Next year, you could expect to a lower level of losses. I would say a high single digit number. That's the right place.
I can pick on Spain.
Yeah, on Spain.
Spain.
Spain, margins and restrictions.
Yeah. There are indeed re-restrictions in the market, and I think the margin in Spain is one of the lowest currently in Europe. However, we are, our margin is higher than the market. We continue to see this gap of William Hill trading higher margin than the market continue in the last couple of months as well. We continue to invest. Obviously a lot has changed in the regulation, but so far we see a good ROI.
On the U.K. question, yes, we have seen some declines in gross win and net revenue, we've reduced our marketing spend proportionally. We've maintained our marketing ratios for the U.K. business. Obviously then we've just got to be a bit more agile as to where we spend that money to get the best returns. We have reduced total absolute spend and kept our ratios in line.
Perfect. Thanks, guys.
Beth.
Hi, Richard Stuber from Numis. First question, actually. Can I just ask about your guidance for this year talking about single digit revenue decline? Is that entirely the U.K. or is that also a function of maybe refocusing some of your optimized countries of, i.e., sort of pulling out?
This is substantially the U.K..
The second question, just on the retail estate, Phil, if that's all right. Obviously you've optimized it in the last couple of years, but obviously the last few months you've seen sort of increasing energy costs, wage bills, et cetera. Do you still think that 1,850 shops is optimum and, you know, what would be optimal estate size?
Yeah. 1,350. I wish we had 1,850. I do think that the 1,350 is still the optimal number. I mean, clearly the energy price change has been a substantial cost change and as has the National Living Wage. We've been able to mitigate a large part of the National Living Wage increase by restructuring the business, which we're just in the process of completing. We're confident we can take most of the pain from the National Living Wage change out. That GBP 15 million of cost pressure doesn't change our target number of shops. 1,350 is about the optimal number.
There's very few loss-making shops in the estate now because we took decisive action back in 2019, perhaps more decisive than some other operators. Now we can reap the benefit of that with a highly efficient estate that we're very confident in.
Can I ask one final question on the background checks on, online. I think you said if it's more than GBP 500 of losses, background checks are carried out. How does that work, and is there any friction at all from a customer's point of view, and, yeah, any just color around that, please?
Yeah. First of all, those checks happen in the background, so it is frictionless. I'll let Harinder expand on that a bit.
We do focus on frictionless checks if possible. As a maybe to your question, but as a specific example, when we need to verify the identity of a customer, we would go through a kind of electronic verification process behind the scenes, and that would be effective for the vast majority of our customers. If for some reason that behind-the-scenes process, which looks at things like the electoral roll in the U.K., for some reason, was inconclusive or couldn't get an outcome, only at that point would we ask the customer for some form of identity documentation. Again, the focus is very much on the discreet behind-the-scenes checks that can be done at scale, at pace, with minimal friction.
Of course, if we need to engage the customer, then we would.
It's more about verification of the person as opposed to the affordability of that person with background checks.
Well, with the background checks, it is very much around diligence. However, there are things that we do from an affordability perspective as well. There are cases where there is public information available, and we use third-party providers in which to kind of source that publicly available information. Again, where we can avoid asking the customer information because we've got other data points we can utilize even for affordability, we will do that.
Hello. Thanks. Ed Young from Morgan Stanley. I've got one question on the market consideration framework, slide 31, comparing that, I guess, to slide 51, where you go through your international markets. I guess I'm curious, if I look at 51, Romania is your highest brand awareness out of all those markets. I don't see a Romanian flag on there. I'm just wondering, in terms of the growth markets, doesn't appear to be much sort of Eastern Europe, doesn't appear to be LatAm. Can you just talk broadly about the considerations? Obviously, there has to be a level of focus, I understand that. How have you made those judgments in terms of where's attractive and where you're going to sort of choose to harvest or optimize, as you've termed it? Thanks.
That's a good question. First of all, Romania is indeed a high market share country but has changed the tax framework change in Romania, which means it has become a less profitable market. Therefore, we're moving resources for higher growth but also higher profitable markets. That's specifically on Romania, but on the rest of the considerations of how do we decide to invest in one market versus the other, I'll let Vaughan expand on that.
I lost my bet on you being the first question, Ed. In Romania, you know, like Itai said, look, we've got high single digit market share. It's a really good market for us. Reaping the profits from that rather than competing with some really strong local sports-led brands is the right strategy for us to maximize returns. In terms of the broader framework, we essentially use a huge dataset to rank each market that we operate in in terms of its attraction. How big is the market? How stable are the regulations and taxes? What's the growth opportunity? What's the shape of that market in terms of competition? Then we layer over that, what's our competitive position? What assets do we bring into that market?
How strong is our chance of success in terms of investing and competing hard? What's our brand awareness? How many differentiated channels do we have in terms of access to marketing or payments or, you know, different customer routes? We layer all of those across each other and essentially look at how do we allocate our time and resources to the opportunities where we maximize our chance of success and returns. It's very detailed. I'd love to run through it with you, but it's got a huge amount of sensitive information, so I can't.
More questions? Okay. Are they... Yeah. In the back.
Hi. It's Ollie Westbrook from BlackRock. I was just wondering if you could give some more comment, color on the commentary you provided earlier today in your strategy update on potentially coming to the debt markets in the near future, more specifically in terms of timelines as well as rationale. Whether that be sort of addressing the high proportion of floating rate debt or whether this move is potentially been something which has been planned for a bit longer term. Secondly, if you were to come to the market, to issue fixed rate debt, what would be the advantages, say over hedging?
I'll let Yariv address that.
In our debt structure today, we have some portion which is held by the underwriter, this part was always planned to be syndicated. We are talking now about GBP 350 million, which were the delayed draw facility, which we used recently in order to pay back the 2026 bond of William Hill. In terms of timeline, as we mentioned in the announcement this morning, this is whether the next few weeks or the next few months that we will go to the market. In terms of changing the overall cost of debt, I wouldn't expect that to have any material impact on the overall cost of debt.
We do expect that to help in terms of the overall hedging plan that we have in place, and we are shooting for at least 50% of the debt to be fixed in interest.
Hello. Sorry. In terms of the remainder of the TLA, would you plan to come back to address that as well or?
If, assuming you are referring to the other TLA, the Euro TLA, this is now held by underwriter who are happy to keep that in the balance sheet. This is not going to be syndicated in the near future.
Great. Thanks a lot.
Just one. Sorry. One, like, really important point to add on that. Our first major maturity is in 2027. We have a really long-term cap structure.
Okay. Any further questions from the room? Ivor?
Thank you. Just carrying on that point, is there an obvious point that we should know about the cost of refinancing any of this relatively expensive debt early? You mentioned the maturity in 2027. Is there an obvious date at which there's a cliff edge, suddenly it would get cheaper in terms of make-whole costs and fees, or is it just linear out to the maturities?
No. The maturity is for 2027, 2028. Now, it's reasonable to assume that, you know, in few years when we start to deleverage, we will have the possibility to actually refinance and reduce the overall cost of the debt, and we will definitely will do so when we will be in that position. If we were talking about being below 3.5x net debt to EBITDA in end of 2025, that's pretty much the time you can think about possibility to start looking into or possibility to reduce the cost of debt.
Okay. Thank you. While I've got the mic again, just on the U.S.-
Yeah.
It's relatively minor now, but is the Sports Illustrated brand relevant to a casino-focused strategy, or is there another leg of U.S. strategy to discuss with us later? Thank you.
It is based on the research that we did. First of all, Sports Illustrated is household brand in the US that appeals to a significant, to a significant, slightly older male audience, as Vaughan described them before. They're also interested in casino games which, you know, we found out through research. So the fact that the brand is associated with sports does not mean that it's not relevant for casino as well. The plan is actually to engage with the players through sports betting and sports content, but to offer them a very relevant casino experience. I don't know if you saw on the slides, we already integrated the wheel mechanism there, which is a Sports Illustrated kind of a lucky sports-themed wheel for casino.
We're developing proprietary games themed with Sports Illustrated iconic images and created a slot game with them. We are bringing the Sports Illustrated life into the casino as well.
Yeah. The first market for this will be Michigan. We will go live with the Sports Illustrated Casino in Michigan.
More questions? James, do we have If there aren't any more questions in the room, maybe we can address some questions from the online.
Yeah. Is this on? A number of them have been answered already. I'll only go through the ones that haven't. Could you update on the Netherlands licensing situation and potential launch date there?
Netherlands licensing situation, we're still in the process of obtaining a license, and I assume we will get a license soon. Again, that's in process. In the short term, we don't have a plan to launch Netherlands in 2023, because of the other integration priorities from a technology perspective, we are probably going to delay the launch of Netherlands to a year after that.
Yeah. You talked about continued product development, but then there's significant amount of CapEx synergies. Will the reduced CapEx of GBP 90 million, does that mean you're hindering your product development with that reduced CapEx?
Yeah. Even with the reduced amount of CapEx, obviously that's a combined CapEx of both groups. Even with the combined reduction, the reduction in CapEx is mainly from products, developments, and platforms that William Hill developed in the last few years, and we are essentially moving investment out of those platforms. For instance, they had a whole new gaming and betting platform that was built in the last few years. This is obviously after we made the choices of platform that it's become redundant, so we're reducing investment out of there, and that had took an immediate effect.
A lot of that is coming from areas that we're not investing in, but we are maintaining product capabilities in our core platform, and we will continue to deliver product development alongside the focus on migration and integration from William Hill and Mr Green into the 888 platform.
You've talked about reducing debt. Are there any other ways to reduce debt faster, such as any sales of non-core assets?
Yeah, we're looking at all kinds of ways to reduce debt. We're always considering things like sales of non-core assets, but there's nothing specific to report on at this moment.
In terms of the U.K. expectations for low single-digit revenue decline, is this in line with what you think the market will be doing, and does that include any impact of the white paper?
That's a good question. The market, I mean, the different players in the market, we're hearing similar things, somewhere between flat-ish, maybe low single-digit growth or low single-digit decline between the different operators. I think there are a lot of changes that were made into specifically into our systems, both on 888 and William Hill, in terms of the processes, in terms of the thresholds, which both Phil and Harinder mentioned in the presentation, that already essentially took what I think is going to be a large part of the impact of the changing regulations. If I can say that's been taken fully, we don't know until the regulations will come out.
Definitely all the mitigation steps that we took in the last year, will reduce the impact of regulatory changes that will be coming soon.
There's only one more on the online system for now, which is can you just talk about general macroeconomic conditions and where they are today versus where you are last year, and how much of an impact has that had on your plans?
I'll let Yariv address that one.
In general, in the presentation today, you could see that the decline in revenue that we see in the U.K. is not coming actually from a lower number of active or lower engagement, it's actually coming from the output. When you look at the massive decline in output, it's at 23%. This is a combination of all the safer gambling measurement that we added into our platform, it's also possibly taking in consideration also market condition and the pressure on the consumer. It's very difficult obviously to say how much is each component comprised out of this, but this is definitely within the number already.
Yeah. Yeah.
James Rowland Clark from Barclays. Just, could you comment on whether you're seeing any of those sort of slowdown ARPU trends in other markets beyond the U.K.?
Um-
You said it's a combination of safer gambling.
More significantly in the U.K.
Any other markets you'd like to call out?
The reason why we think the decline in output is more related to safer gambling than the consumer situation, because we see it in a massive way more in the U.K. That's actually what give us the feeling that this is less about the current market condition and more about the safer gambling measurement.
Just on U.K. retail, I think the presentation says a continuation of the revenue trends you see at the moment into next year. Could you talk about how the retail estate indexes to certain demographics and why you're confident you can sustain that revenue trend? I guess, you know, you're more exposed to lower income individuals.
Not necessarily. I mean, certainly the demographic is older, has a more traditional pattern. We'll find lots of repeat visits, very low spending levels sustained over a longer period of time. What we use our colleagues to do is to ensure that we can intervene if we see anything different. I think if happy to take any of you to one of our shops, but what you'd see immediately is most of our colleagues know every customer in that shop, I mean, literally by name, and they can tell when something is changing. If something changes, we interact, we do a safer gambling interaction with that customer, and we find out what's happening, and we're able to therefore intervene very early. What that leaves then is a very predictable, consistent trend.
We could spot if someone was in an unaffordable position because they'd had some kind of life event or indeed they were struggling under a cost of living crisis specifically for that customer, we would obviously slow their spend down. In aggregate, we're not seeing that. What we're seeing is that the customers continue to visit the shops and indeed, you know, we do provide free heating in our shops. Potentially that's a small advantage too. I think what I'm very confident about is that the mechanisms to spot if something was starting to go wrong are very clear, and we have thousands of colleagues really well trained to spot it. So far, we're not seeing any of those negative signs.
We need to get more people into the shops so they can see what it's like.
Absolutely. Yeah. Very well.
You know, it's sort of GBP 7,000 a week on average spend per shop. The, you know, the colleagues in there know pretty much everyone who's coming in. They're a bit like your local cafe, your local pub, your, you know, it's a really sort of regular trade where people, that's what they do with their spare time. As Phil said earlier, you know, GBP 12 a bet on average it's a sort of low cost entertainment. Go and watch a couple of races, check the football results.
Any more online?
There was one more question online.
Okay. Thank you everyone. Thank you for your participation, for the patience. I know it's a late afternoon and would now like to welcome everyone for some drinks and informal chat and some canapes. Thank you very much.