Interim results presentation. I'm Jon Mendelsohn, and alongside me are Yariv Dafna, the Group Chief Financial Officer, and Vaughan Lewis, the Chief Strategy Officer. This morning on slide 2, you can see the agenda for today's presentation. I'll be providing an overview of key developments during the first half before handing over to Yariv and Vaughan to take you through our financial and strategic progress in more detail. We will then provide the opportunity to take your questions. Slide 4 reaffirms our key priorities as a board, against which we have made good progress in all key areas in the four months since our full-year results and Q1 update. Firstly, I was delighted to announce the appointment of Per Widerström as Chief Executive Officer a few weeks ago.
In the meantime, I have been, and will continue to be, spending a lot of time with him in preparation to hand over, and this is reinforcing my conviction that he will be a great success in this critical role as we build the business for the future. We are also well advanced in our process to recruit a Chief Financial Officer, and Per will be involved in the selection process, but we hope to announce an appointment soon. I'd like to thank again Yariv Dafna for extending his stay with us during this crucial phase for the business as we deliver accelerated synergies and execute our plan to unlock the future potential of the business. Across the business, we have established a strong operating model and excellent teams to drive us forward.
We continue to reinforce and strengthen our teams with excellent external hires and internal promotions, including recently expanding the role of Phil Walker to Chief Commercial Officer, looking at driving growth across the whole business. Harinder Gill has taken on an expanded role across risk and operations, looking at how we can drive the most benefits from our operations and compliance teams and ensuring everything we do for customers is joined up and the best it can be. Our second priority is ESG and sustainability. Our ambition is to be one of the most trusted operators in the industry. We continue to make progress in strengthening our governance and compliance and ensuring that we are building a sustainable business for the long term.
You will see in the statement that we have agreed a settlement with the Gibraltar regulator in relation to the failings that we identified in our Middle East business in January of this year. Having identified these failings ourselves, we took swift and comprehensive action to rectify these and notified the regulator. The Gibraltar regulator has been complimentary about the proactive, swift and robust remedial actions we have taken, and our new governance structure to identify and prevent any failings is working well. As a board, we remain resolutely focused on sustainability and compliance, which is fundamental to the business we are building.
The actions that we have taken to enhance our compliance framework have had and continue to have an impact on our revenues. We are confident that these are the right actions for the business to create long-term value. All of these actions are changing the shape of the business and leading to a much higher quality and much more sustainable platform for future growth. In Q2, 95% of our group revenues came from customers in locally regulated or taxed countries. The board's third priority is execution, which I will address in more detail on the following slides. On slide 5, we have show how we are executing the strategic plan that we outlined at our Capital Markets Day last November.
You can see on the chart that 888 is a business that was historically relatively subscale and overweight in its offshore market mix.
Through a significant acceleration in growth, partly helped by the COVID lockdowns, we embarked on an ambitious M&A plan to transform our scale. When we spoke to you last November, we reiterated the compelling strategic rationale for the William Hill deal but talked about how external factors had moved against us, including interest rates and the U.K. regulatory environment. This meant our position was one of a newly compliant business with a lower-than-average profitability and high leverage. we had a clear plan to address this, and despite further additional challenges this year with our dot-com operations, we have taken decisive actions to execute on that plan and set the best platform for future growth and value creation.
While this is a complex global business with multiple technology, regulatory, and competitive dynamics, at its heart, there are three key drivers: revenue, marketing, and our operating expenses.
Starting with revenue, we have been taking quite radical actions to change the mix of our revenue to provide a higher quality, more profitable, and more sustainable revenue mix that provides us with a strong platform for growth. As outlined in our full-year results in April, we expect revenues to be lower this year. This reflects the combination of our actions in reducing our exposure to higher-risk offshore markets, implementing progressive, safer gambling restrictions, and removing revenue generated from unprofitable or low-return marketing spend. These actions are both planned and necessary, and our progress in their implementation gives us confidence about our mid-term growth plans and value creation potential. Secondly, marketing spend. As two separate businesses, William Hill and 888 had different marketing plans and strategies.
In markets like the U.K., with the strength of the combined business and with two leading brands, we have changed the marketing strategy to focus on driving sustainable, profitable returns as a portfolio of brands across the market. Now, Paul will run through this in more detail later, but I'm delighted to say this is already delivering really strong results. While our U.K. online revenues are lower, our marketing efficiency has improved dramatically, and our active customers and profits are higher. This reflects our overall plan to create a customer-focused organization with high growth potential. We've seen the foundations of this take shape in the first half, with higher customer volumes, lower average spending levels, lower marketing ratio, and higher profits. This is our platform for the future for sustainable value creation. Thirdly, operating costs.
Our principle here is to achieve the scale benefits in our combined business by removing duplication and delivering best-in-class and scalable shared functions to support our global ambitions. We've made good progress with our technology plans. We look to migrate certain markets onto the 888 platform, where there is a clear and immediate customer benefit in doing so. In markets where the technology integration is more complex, we are setting ourselves up to ensure we have the best platform for the future that can deliver ongoing product improvements now, as well as being future-proof. Our actions on technology and operations have already generated significant synergies. Our focus now is on driving efficiency and setting ourselves up to invest in delivering the best customer experience and ultimately drive growth.
Turning to slide 6, and to summarize our progress in H1, this is how we look to unlock the huge potential of this business. We have made tremendous progress with the integration, delivering GBP 66 million of synergies in the first half of this year and accelerating our plans such that we will have achieved our target run rate of GBP 150 million within 2024, a year earlier than planned. We have delivered on our goal of improved profitability, with adjusted EBITDA up 9% and margin improving by around 2.6 percentage points. Yariv will cover the numbers more fully shortly, it's also important to note our guidance for full year 2023 remains unchanged, both on revenue and adjusted EBITDA. On leverage, in just six months, we've already reduced this by 0.5 x.
The speed of deleveraging in the first half was partly helped by some favorable foreign exchange movements, reducing our net debt. We remain committed to bringing the leverage down continually and effectively through to our 2025 target of less than 3.5 x. Overall, I'm delighted to say that during an extremely busy period, we have continued to focus on our priorities and are making excellent progress with our plans. With that, I'm going to hand over to Yariv to walk us through the financial results in more detail.
Thanks, Jon. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Starting with slide 8, with some brief financial highlights. On a reported basis, we saw significant growth in revenue and EBITDA, driven by the acquisition of William Hill last year. EPS is affected by the increased interest cost. We see significant scope for improvement here as we deliver on our plan to expand profitability and deleverage in the coming years. In the appendix to this presentation, there are some more slide on the reported result, including details on the exceptional item and adjustment, being mainly the purchase price allocation, amortization, and transaction and integration cost.
On a pro forma basis, we are doing exactly what we said we would, both in terms of delivering accelerated synergies and refining our operating model to set a strong platform for future growth.
While this has had a short-term impact on revenue as expected, with revenue down 7% to GBP 882 million, we can already see improving profitability even despite the impact of the Middle East suspension. Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 156 million, up 9% year-over-year, and representing an Adjusted EBITDA margin of just under 18%. This is below our guidance of 20% for the full year. Synergy benefit and marketing phasing will always weighted toward H2. We are on track to meet market expectation for Adjusted EBITDA of around GBP 350 million. On slide 9, we show the main item in the bridge between 2022 actual to pro forma result and then to our 2023 actual result.
On the left, you can see the revenue bridge starting from reported revenue in H1 2022 of GBP 332 million. Including William Hill result and excluding the bingo business, the pro forma revenues would have been GBP 943 million. Retail revenue are GBP 16 million higher, reflecting the positive trend across the high street and the benefit of the CapEx spend in the last two years.
U.K. online revenue are GBP 35 million lower, reflecting both the impact of player mix shift toward lower-spending customer and the short-term top-line hit from the removal of unprofitable marketing spend. International revenue are GBP 43 million lower, reflecting mainly the impact of regulatory and compliance changes, including the suspension of VIPs in the Middle East, but also the refined focus on our core and growth market. In the core markets, Italy and Spain, we saw strong growth year-on-year. On the right-hand side, you can see the same bridge for adjusted EBITDA. The important point to make here is that while you see the revenue decline, EBITDA is up, mainly in the U.K. online, where margin are significantly higher, leading to a GBP 11 million increase in EBITDA. On slide 10, we present the revenue and adjusted EBITDA by segment on a pro forma basis.
We operate the business in two main segments: the U.K., which include our U.K. and Ireland online businesses and our retail business, and the international, which include all our businesses outside the U.K., including the U.S. For the U.K., pro forma revenue were down 3% in H1 2023, reflecting strong trend in retail, more than offset by the structural changes we have been making to our online business. For our international business, revenue were down 14%.
As already mentioned, the main driver of this was the closure of our Middle East VIP in January, which explain a little over half of the drop and further changes to our dot-com compliance framework, which negatively impact our revenue. Excluding these regulatory and compliance changes, our international revenue were broadly stable. We have effectively right-sized the international business and improved sustainability significantly, with only 5% now coming from non-locally regulated or taxed markets. This new position set a really strong base for future growth, with an increased focus on our core and growth markets. Moving to slide 11, we have made good progress on our three core financial priorities that we laid out at our Investor Day.
Our first focus is execution of synergies. We delivered additional GBP 66 million of cash synergies in H1 2023, mainly across operation and marketing.
As Jon mentioned, we now expect to reach the GBP 150 million target by 2024. We continue to optimize the business and seek out efficiency that can benefit the customer experience and plan to reinvest any additional saving opportunity in accelerating growth. Our second priority is improving our adjusted EBITDA margin. As we have been executing on our integration plan and delivering improved ROI on our marketing spend, we have confidence in our plan to deliver an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20% in the full year 2023. Our third priority is deleveraging. We ended the year with net debt of GBP 1.73 billion and trailing leverage of 5.6x. We already making good progress with this leverage, reducing to 5.1x at the end of June.
Looking forward, I expect further progress to end the year at slightly below 5x. As we outlined in the full-year result, deleverage in 2023 comes through EBITDA growth, with the net debt expected to be broadly neutral for the year. 2024 and on is when we get the benefit of both EBITDA expansion and cash flow to enable debt reduction. We continue to target below 3.5x in 2025. We will continue to be disciplined with capital allocation to prioritize debt reduction in the next couple of years. Turning to slide 12, an overview of our cash flow for H1, where we saw net cash, excluding customer balances, increase by GBP 11 million to GBP 188 million.
Our adjusted EBITDA of GBP 156 million turned into GBP 76 million of underlying free cash flow after reflecting tax of GBP 12 million, net working capital of GBP 15 million, CapEx of GBP 33 million, and lease liability of GBP 19 million. CapEx is already benefiting from early synergies, and the lease costs have increased slightly due to the sale and leaseback. We then have GBP 23 million of exceptional costs related to the cost to achieve synergies and GBP 2 million of debt amortization.
Net interest of GBP 73 million reflects some timing benefit with our expectation for the full year of GBP 165 million-GBP 170 million unchanged. Our disciplined approach to capital allocation includes reviewing opportunity to generate cash from lower return or non-core asset, and during the period, we realized approximately GBP 41 million from non-core asset sale, including the sale and leaseback of some freehold properties.
The net effect of all of this is cash increasing by a little over GBP 11 million, while the other GBP 56 million reflects the change in lease liability and gross debt. Leases are up slightly with the sale and leaseback, but the main movement is gross debt, where FX rate moved favorably versus December. Turning to slide 13, I would like to provide an update on our outlook for 2023. We see no change to our expectation to low to mid single-digit revenue decline for the full year. Following the 7% drop in H1, 2023, the decline likely to be at the mid single-digit end of the range, reflecting the slower than expected pace of recovery in the Middle East. We are also remain on track to deliver an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20% this year.
We delivered a margin of little under 18% in the first half, and with the phasing of marketing investment and synergies, we have good visibility on this, reaching 20% for the full year. Furthermore, the other element of our technical guidance remained the same or improved from our guidance in April, and we continue to focus on strong cash management to make progress with our deleverage targets. Overall, this has been good first half, reflecting our strong financial discipline and delivering on our target to increase profitability and drive cash generation. I'm pleased with the progress we have made, particularly with reducing the leverage and with good visibility of slightly less than 5x at the end of this year, as we continue to progress toward our target of 3.5x or below in 2025.
I would like to mention again that additional financial information can be found in the appendix. I will now hand over to Vaughan to run through the strategic highlights.
Thanks, Yariv. Good morning, everyone. Turning to slide 15, this is a reminder of our strategic pyramid. This sets the guardrails for how we manage the business, prioritize our actions, and allocate our investments. Jon and Yariv have both outlined the strong progress we are making against these priorities. We're building a really focused, streamlined, and more profitable business that is built to deliver future growth and value creation. 2023 is a key year in our position plan potential roadmap as we take rapid and assertive actions to change the mix of the business to drive sustainable value creation. This will allow us to evolve from a focus on integration to a clear focus on driving growth as we maximize the potential of the platform we are creating.
Turning to slide 16, a few examples of this in practice in our biggest market, the U.K.
The summary of the first half for the online business in the U.K. is higher player volumes and higher market share of players, lower ARPU as the business is remixed towards the most sustainable, lower-spending player groups, and higher profitability as we focus our marketing investment on building sustainable returns. On the left-hand side, you can see continued growth in our active player base. This growth is coming from lower-spending recreational cohorts. We're also seeing increased brand penetration here, with 15% of all active gamblers now using the William Hill brand, up 400 basis points compared to two years ago, and this provides us with a really strong platform for future revenue market share gains. While the charts show active players and our market share of players is up, we know our revenue market share is lower.
This reflects a significant and ongoing reduction in our exposure to higher-spending cohorts. In the middle chart, you can see that the mix of revenue from higher-spending cohorts has dropped from nearly 50% of our U.K. revenue to around 20% today. What's also pleasing is that the absolute revenue from recreational customers continues to grow, with recreational revenue 7% higher in the first half. We see this as a really positive shift in terms of future mix and has positioned us well for the full implementation of the White Paper outcomes, which are now being consulted on further and will be implemented over the coming years. We already have stringent affordability measures in place and low slots limits of between GBP 5 and GBP 10. These limitations and interventions do create friction with our customers.
We agree with the aims of the White Paper in reducing this friction, improving the customer experience, and creating a level playing field for all operators, and look forward to working with the industry on responding to the live consultations to produce an evidence-based outcome that is good for customers. On the right-hand side, you can see the progress we have made to make our marketing more efficient. We have seen a significant reduction in CPA and an improvement in the marketing ratio. At the start of this year, we brought together all of our brands in the U.K., and we have changed our marketing mix to deliver sustainable, profitable returns for both sports and gaming investments.
This is most evident in the 888 brand, as we altered the strategy and stopped investing heavily in building brand penetration in sports, as well as adapted the casino strategy to focus on building more sustainable revenue. We look forwards, we're even more optimistic about a return to revenue growth in the U.K. in 2024, with the reshaping and improved mix of the business leaving us really confident about our plans to grow market share over time in the U.K. Turning to slide 17 and our market focus. We've covered U.K. retail and U.K. online already, and I'm pleased to say that it has been another strong period in both of our other core markets, Italy and Spain, with both growing revenue and contribution by double digits.
Within our growth markets, these were up 11%, excluding Germany, which is continuing to act as a drag on growth while the impact of regulatory change there washes through. The main change in revenue relative to last year is the result of a significant decline in our offshore dot-com revenues, which Yariv has already discussed. While this means overall revenues are lower in this period, it is significantly improving both the quality and the sustainability of our business, and improving our future growth profile as our business mix shifts towards our core and growth markets, where we are building market-leading positions. We've been delighted with the progress in our pipeline markets, with our Africa joint venture going from strength to strength.
We launched in September, and at the end of the 10th full month, we have already passed 1 million customers and are seeing continued strong revenue growth here, with a 25% month-to-month CAGR so far this year. The success here gives us real confidence about the value creation. We recently completed the acquisition of BetLion, and this further supports our expansion in Africa, with some excellent front-end technology and adding further licensed jurisdictions. We're looking forward to seeing accelerating growth here with future market launches over the rest of this year and into 2024. Turning to slide 18 to outline our continued progress with our three key enablers: product and content leadership, world-class brands, and customer excellence.
It was a busy period for product launches, with the SI Casino launching in Michigan in February and quickly ramping up to 1% market share here.
In the Q1, we also received our German gaming license and went live with Mr Green over the fully licensed 888 platform. Within the retail business, we upgraded and expanded our market-leading SSBT estate and are rolling out best-in-class new gaming cabinets across the estate, which also benefit from unique games and provide the best experience on the high street for gaming. On the brand side, we launched some really innovative William Hill Vegas out-of-home advertising, with an augmented reality slot machine appearing when you scan a QR code on a billboard. For the start of the new football season, we launched a huge new campaign fronted by Éric Cantona, building out William Hill as the voice of authority in football, which hopefully some of you have seen already.
I'm also sure many of you have heard the outstanding Up Front with Simon Jordan podcast series, which has consistently been ranked amongst the top sports podcasts and has already amassed over 15 million views across our social media channels. On the customer side, we continue to implement significant improvements for our customers as we get the benefits of our combined operations, delivering both cost synergies and an improved experience for our customers. Our customer satisfaction scores have been consistently rising as a result, as we continue to get better at understanding their pain points, and we are getting better at addressing issues even before they arise.
Overall, this has been a period of strong strategic progress with our products, brands, and customer focus, building a strong platform for future growth. I'd now like to hand back to Jon to conclude.
Turning to slide 20, to conclude with our continued progress against our position, plan, potential roadmap. During the first half, we have made huge progress against the plans that we laid out at the end of last year, accelerating the delivery of synergies and largely completing the operational integration of the business. We have implemented a more efficient and more effective marketing plan, which better uses our world-class brands to deliver stronger and more sustainable returns on our marketing, delivering a better customer experience and improving profitability. We have positively changed the mix of our business, reducing risks and providing a higher quality, more sustainable platform for future growth.
With the appointment of Per, I will be handing over to a world-class CEO and look forward to updating you soon with a CFO appointment as we continue to strengthen our team and execute our plan to deliver enhanced shareholder value. With that, I would like to hand over to the moderator for your questions.
Thank you. Our first question comes from Robert Ciaccia from Investec. Good morning. Could you give us some granularity on the amount of synergies allocated to your U.K. and Ireland digital EBITDA in H1? Could you also comment on the evolution of the U.S. business? As a reminder, please just unmute yourself.
Thank you. Yes, look, we don't, report or breaking out the, synergies, in that sort of, in that sort of detail, but what would be, what would be very helpful, I think, is if Yariv would be able to, outline the progress on the synergies. Then I will ask, Vaughan to update on the U.S. market.
Okay. As Jon mentioned, we don't really break down the synergies per market, but if you look at the information that we provide in the presentation, in the appendixes, you can see that the OpEx is going down across the board in the U.K., in international, and in the corporate level. Considering that we are integrating the business to be one unit, so, we don't have the exact allocation, however, all the business is enjoying from the synergies.
Thanks. On, U.S., yeah. We outlined our Betting 2.0 plan at the Investor Day last year, which is really pivoting the focus to a specific demographic of SI fans and focusing on gaming, in February this year, we launched SI Casino in Michigan, and we've been really pleased with the performance there. So we've very quickly got to 1% share. We've got good customer data there. We're seeing good retention, good player values, and very attractive CPAs. So that's given us the kind of data, the knowledge, the experience to really push on with that Betting 2.0 plan. I'm sure you all know, the iGaming market is huge in the US, about $6 billion across the three main states and growing at 20% or so a year.
You know, our plan is focused on getting, you know, low single-digit market share of that iGaming market with, with sports across a wider range of states, but as a complementary product, with most of the focus on growth and investment on, on casino. We can get to, to, to nice levels of, of profitability with, with that low single-digit share across those gaming markets. You know, that's the plan. It's, it started well. It's still quite early days with, with the casino in Michigan, but yeah, been really pleased with that, and that's really reinforced our confidence in, in our US plan.
We now have a few questions from Ivor Jones, from Peel Hunt. If additional synergies are going to be reinvested in growth, does that mean that business will be managed to hit GBP 351 million EBITDA? There is no profit upside for this year. Is the 5% of revenue that is not taxed or regulated sustainable, and what is the second half cash exceptionals number?
Thank you. I think it's important to note that we've given a very firm continued view on saying that we are meeting the guidance as expected, we're not looking to change that. Where we are looking within the context of the synergies and other things that we could do and our attempts to look at what else we can do to invest in our growth, that's very much on our pathway to our 2025 target. I think it needs to be seen in that context rather than something which is particularly short term. Just in relation to the performance of our optimized markets, I'll ask Vaughan to comment on that, and then Yariv will take you through the second half cash exceptionals.
Yeah. On those dot-com markets or, or the offshore markets, we have seen a big change in there, as you can see, and, and that reflects much more robust policies and processes, and lower levels at which we intervene. Similar dynamics than we're seeing in, in the U.K. Just like in the U.K., you know, when you ask customers for relatively intrusive levels of information and documentation, some of them decide to stop playing or, or go and play with someone else, who, who doesn't ask for, for that same level of documentation. We have seen a big kind of mix shift there. In terms of looking forwards, you know, this is a, this is a really good part of the business for us.
We have a global scalable tech stack and operations. We have a really robust policies and processes for regulation and compliance, and that enables us to service customers from a really wide range of countries on a very low-risk basis. We'd expect that to continue. We wouldn't expect that 5% to change much looking forwards. You know, we're certainly not looking to exit more markets, and, you know, we do see these as attractive long-tail markets spread across, you know, many, many markets in there, and nice kind of incremental cash flow to generate incremental returns from our asset base.
Regarding the H2 cash exceptional, so these are mainly the cost to achieve synergies. The number remain unchanged, GBP 60 million for the full year. Considering that we did about 24 in the first half, so that's about 36 in the second half. More, maybe broader comment on the CTA, despite the acceleration of the synergies, the CTA remain unchanged in terms of our expectation, the GBP 100 million over three years, and also the phasing is, we consider the phasing to remain unchanged.
The next question comes from David Brohan at Goodbody. Is there any change to FY 2023 synergy delivery guidance in light of the acceleration from FY 2025 to FY 2024?
This is again, the synergies and the plan to achieve synergies will continue into 2025. What we are confirming that the GBP 150 that we set as a target will be achieved already in 2024 instead of 2025. Obviously, there will be more opportunity to drive more synergies, but we will be looking to take additional synergies and invest in the business and in growth rather than realizing these synergies to additional profits. In terms of the 2023, we don't see any point now to go into the exact number of 2023 because we are providing a clear guidance about this year.
Both in terms of what will be the revenue and what will be the EBITDA, so everything is in the number that we are providing.
Thank you. A follow-up from David. Are there any other non-core assets that you could potentially sell to reduce leverage further?
There is nothing material right now that we can discuss at this point.
The next question comes from Richard Stuber at Numis. We would welcome any more color on current trading in the last six weeks. Could you give U.S. market share in the states you are in? What are your U.S. losses, and when do you expect to be breakeven? When do you expect the ongoing license review by the Gambling Commission to complete?
In relation to the final part of that about the review, we would hope that it would end at some point during the course of this year, in either to the tail end of this quarter or the beginning of next quarter. But it really does depend on the Gambling Commission's view of the external issues that we are being judged on, and what our approach is to them. I think the timing is very much in their hands, but we're hoping that this will be resolved in a reasonable, in a reasonable timescale.
As we've, as we've said, it's not a matter that's looking at any of our particular operations, it's really about the responsibility of the board to ensure that the core licensing objectives, which the Gambling Commission is charged to ensure, are dealt with adequately and our performance in relation to those. As a fairly unique situation, it's hard to give a specific timescale, but I think it's, as I say, very much in their, in their hands. We will hopefully see this finished during the course of this calendar year. In relation to the second issues, just to give a bit more further color, I'll ask Vaughan.
Sure. Current trading, I mean, we haven't said much, but we've given very clear guidance for the, for the full year. I think you can, you know, expect and understand that the current trading remains in line with prior trends, and, and, and we're on that trajectory to, to that full-year guidance. Just to add a sort of couple of snippets on that, I suppose you hopefully you've seen the Éric Cantona adverts and the, and the, and the big Epic Odds offers, for William Hill in the U.K. for the start of the new football season. You know, as we've been seeing all year really, those, those Epic Odds have really been landing well and, and resonating well with customers.
We do continue to see really strong growth in active customers, both online and in store, actually. You know, those, those offers have also been available in retail, and customers love those and have been snapping those up. You know, everything we talked about in the presentation and in terms of the guidance, you know, that's kind of where, where we're looking at in terms of, in terms of current trading. In terms of U.S., you know, I expanded on that for Roberta's question. We've been pleased with the early data from Michigan and Casino, and that's, that's really where the focus is.
With a casino-led strategy, with sportsbook as a, as a complementary and as a cross-sell, you know, like I said, we don't need to get huge to get to breakeven and get to profitability. You know, low single-digit market share gets us, gets us into that kind of ballpark. You know, that's what we're focused on, and we've been, we've been pleased with the early performance in Michigan, and that, that reinforces our confidence in the plan over, over the next few years.
Thank you. The next question comes from Karan at JP Morgan. Blended H1 online margin implies H2 online margin being higher by approximately high single-digit %. Is this improvement primarily driven by lower marketing and higher synergies in the second half? Seems like a big sequential improvement. Any color on that would be helpful.
The way to look on our guidance for the full year, that revenue will be similar between H1 and H2, and the highest profitability will come from extra synergies to be realized and achieved in the second half of the year, but also lower marketing. Marketing tend to be more weighted toward the first half of the year, and we continue also to optimize our marketing. With less marketing and less OpEx, we will be able to deliver the higher EBITDA that will take us to the 20% EBITDA margin for the full year.
Our next set of questions comes from Shuying Xu. Can you provide breakdown on 2023 U.K. and Ireland retail revenue slowdown to 4% year-on-year from 8% year-on-year in Q1 2023? How much of it came from closed shops, and how much was same-store changes? Secondly, what's the intention of FS Gaming regarding their shareholding?
I will address the retail and let Jon later on answer about FS Gaming. On the retail, that's correct that our Q1 was 8 and then the second was 4% Normally, the Q2 is a bit weaker than the Q1. I wouldn't draw a lot of conclusion from this change. The trend in the retail are quite good. We see increase in the activity. We did close the some shop during the first half of the year, which have a certain impact on the business. Actually, what we see is a very normalized trading of Q1 versus Q2.
Thank you. Unsurprisingly, you'll know that I won't be, I won't be speaking on behalf of, of other people. It's not really possible for me to speak about the intentions of FS Gaming regarding their shareholding. All I can say is that the rationale of when they acquired their shares, of how they felt there was a large opportunity for massive growth for us and for the development of the share price and value of the business still holds. We welcome the investors who saw that and see that opportunity, and we'll continue to do so.
The next set of questions comes from Simon Davies at Deutsche Bank. There was a significant reduction in marketing margin given increased optimization. Where do you think online marketing spend can get to as percentage of revenues? Secondly, what is average lease length in retail, and do you think you have sufficiently rationalized retail estate, or do you expect further reductions in store numbers? Thirdly, what is current balance of recreational customers? Does the shift to recreational have much further to go?
If I could just give a sense about the nature of the sort of the retail estate, is that is that we still are very committed to the retail estate, and we're very committed to our footprint and making sure that whatever stores that we have are really gonna provide value for the business. There are complexities about location, about cost, and other sorts of things. The footprint we have today, you know, will be different to what we have tomorrow. We are. It would be wrong to assume that it would only go in one direction. We're very committed to our retail estate, and we've seen some great developments. We've got a great team, and we've had some real, you know, very good investments that we've made and, and product changes.
I would just put it in those terms. In terms of the leasing costs and also the marketing margin, I'll ask Yariv to refer to those.
Yeah. In terms of the retail numbers, we don't expect this year to have more reduction there in the number of store. Again, not material change. We might have here and there some, some closure or some opening. It's fair to assume that this is the number that will go with us until the year end. In terms of the marketing ratio, the marketing ratio in the first half was 22.4%. We are expecting, as we provide in the guidance, to be at 20%-21% on the full year basis.
This level looks to us as more optimized, and I would say low 20 rather than the high 20, or above that. On the recreational level, I think that, you know, it's very difficult to go into an exact definition of what it means, recreational level. It definitely means that we are less depends on a high-value customer. Again, we don't want to go into a definition of what, what does it mean by number.
Thank you. We now have some questions from Adam Baston. Congratulations on the results this morning. Great to see things moving in the right direction. However, there wasn't any explicit mention of the 2025 targets today. Are those targets still achievable?
Uh-
Also- sorry, also in the results, you mentioned that GBP 54 million synergies were delivered in H1. To clarify, does that mean that the six-month effect of those GBP 54 million savings were fully realized in the cost base presented, or were the GBP 54 million only achieved by June 30, such that there is more impact to come from those savings in H2?
Thank you. Well, I do hope that I sort of did try and mention the 2025 targets and say that that still remains. The architecture that we have and the plans and the goals we are aiming towards, and we still are, are reporting confidence that we can meet every part of that journey, what we can do this year, and what we've done this year in, in what has been a huge transitionary year. Yes, we are very firmly tied to being able to deliver on those and do all the changes and all the work that's necessary to do that, to make the right sort of, create the right sort of efficiencies, to optimize marketing, to look at all the markets, to create the right efficiencies, to have done the full integration.
All of that is working towards being able to achieve the goals that we set for 2025. I'll ask, Yariv, just to, again, provide-
Yeah.
... further details.
Yeah, the synergies of GBP 66 million in the first half, it's on run rate basis that we achieved already in the first half of the year. GBP 12 million out of this are affecting CapEx, and the remaining GBP 54 million affecting our OpEx. Yes.
Thank you. That is all the questions from the webcast this morning. I will hand back to you, Jon.
Thank you very much. We hugely appreciate all, all of you coming today to hear the progress that we've made. We're very committed to the path that we are on, to doing the work that is necessary. This will be one of the last times that I'm speaking to you in this role, and I wanted to firstly say that I'm sure that you will enjoy working with Per when he comes along, and that he will be an excellent interlocutor for you and someone who will provide, you know, the right sort of confidence for you and for the wider market in relation to what we're doing.
I personally want to thank you all for the consideration you've given me while I've been doing this role, and for all the very useful dialogue that we've had. Thank you very much, and we look forward to updating you in due course with our further progress.