Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our half-year results call. I'm joined in Hammersmith today by Jonathan to take any questions you may have following our results announcement. This is obviously not the way we'd normally present our results, and we look forward to a time when we'll be able to meet you all again in person. I hope you've had a chance to watch our H1 presentation, which we posted to our website earlier this morning. If you've not, the recording will remain available and a PDF of the presentation is also available on the site. It may be useful for you to have the presentation open, as we might refer to certain slides in some of our answers.
To summarize the key points of our announcement, we're very pleased with our first half performance and the way the group has maintained its strong momentum against a very challenging backdrop. The 35% EBITDA growth we've announced reflects strong underlying performance across all parts of our business and really demonstrates the importance of the products and geographical diversification that we have within the business. We completed our merger with The Stars Group on May the 5th, and we've made a very good start in integrating our two groups. I'd like to thank our whole team for delivering these results in what were very challenging circumstances. I see great opportunities to invest in our business across each of our four regions, and we will continue to do so in a disciplined and sustainable manner. With that, we'll now take any questions you may have.
In the interest of giving everyone a chance to ask their questions, can I ask you to limit yourselves to two questions each to begin with, and then if we have time, we'll be happy to take follow-ups. Joe will help moderate the questions, but if you have any questions, please just press star one.
Thank you, Peter. Our first question comes from Ed Young from MS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. I've got two, both on the international business, please. The first one's about your reinvestment plan for PokerStars. Your presentation seems to suggest that direct casino acquisition was the biggest area for planned investment. Is that a fair representation of where you think you'll be putting the investment? On the marketing as a percentage of sales, you made that point very clearly about under-investment versus norms of about 25% across the industry. If I look across the rest of your businesses, the weakest business in H1 relatively was Paddy Power Betfair online, that's at 24%, and the strongest were Sky Bet at 16 and Australia at 14, and they were sort of similarly low levels relative to the industry even last year before any Q2 distortions.
How should we think about the right level for all of those businesses and across the group in general, not just PokerStars specific? The second question is on the cross-sell opportunity for sports international. You talked a little bit about the platform in the presentation, but not much about the exchange, which is how you previously sort of couched that cross-sell from both customers. Can you just give some color on how you're thinking about sports cross-sell has developed since you've had a better chance to look at the business and how you frame that opportunity, and does splitting off the Betfair U.K. from the rest of international affect that at all? Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Ed. I'll take your questions in the order which you gave them to us. Look, in terms of the reinvestment plans, you're right that we highlighted the opportunity for direct to casino as the main focus from a sort of marketing perspective. That's partially because we've been able to build a very strong casino business without any direct casino acquisition, showing that there's a very clear opportunity and brand resonance for casino. So that's the main area for us, but also because we know it'll take a little bit longer to get our sports product to the level where we want it to be. I think in your sub-question, which was looking at the level of marketing investment as a percentage of revenues across the different businesses, clearly there are quite a lot of distortions happened in the first half as a result of COVID.
We pulled back marketing investment in some parts of the businesses and pushed on with it in other parts. I don't think that's a particularly sort of clean set of numbers. It's also quite hard to make sort of direct read-across between the different divisions because of the difference of competitive context for them. For example, a business like The Exchange would have different levels of marketing associated with it compared with a sort of more retail-focused business. What I would say is that we do think that there are opportunities to spend extra money behind the international business around the PokerStars brand, both for poker and for casino, and we've announced the intention to spend that money in these results today. We also, of course, are willing to invest where we see good returns elsewhere, and America is a good example of that as well.
In terms of the cross-sell opportunities, your second question around sort of exchange versus sports, there are some limitations on our ability to use the exchange in some of the international markets where the PokerStars business is strong. There are some places where the exchange is not allowed or from a tax perspective, is difficult to operate. We will make sure that we get the right balance between the exchange and sort of straightforward sports betting available for those customers. It will take time to build out the right product capabilities in the international market for customers, whether that's through the exchange in sports.
Exchange we can get there reasonably quickly with our white label solution, subject to us being able to have the exchange in the relevant markets. Sports will take us probably a little bit longer because we want to make sure we get it right. We know when we look at our experience in Sky Bet or Sportsbet or FanDuel, having the right product makes such a big difference to the ability to grow these businesses, particularly when they're focused on recreational customers.
I think final point, Ed, on your first question is it's probably worth looking at the prior year to get a slightly better comparator on the sales and marketing percentage, because as Peter said, there's a lot of distortions. We had the businesses pulling back very heavily when we get into the sort of immediate post-COVID period in terms of marketing, but we also saw an uplift in gaming performance. You saw some customer demand, which wasn't necessarily, as you would expect, normally aligned to sales and marketing spend. It's quite an odd first half to look at the percentages because of everything that happened in the period.
Okay, thanks very much. Just one on that cross-sell opportunities very quickly to follow up. Does splitting the Betfair business U.K. versus international change that cross-sell ability at all, or is that just business as usual?
It doesn't change our ability to drive cross-selling in international, Ed. It's more just making sure that we get the right parts of the businesses and the right parts of the divisions. Whilst we'd originally thought we'd put it all into international, whilst we went through some tech migrations, we found that we've got a better solution for that, which we've used.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Michael Mitchell from Davy. Please go ahead.
Morning, Peter. Morning, Jonathan, thanks for taking my questions. Two, if I could. First of all, on the U.S. and customers acquired. You've clearly acquired a huge number of customers via racing and TVG in the first half of the year. Could you provide a little bit of color on that particular customer cohort, how likely they are to bet on sports, the potential to cross-sell into gaming, depending on state? Just generally, any other observations, kind of, that you've picked up around customer acquisition in the U.S. through what's been a pretty unprecedented period. Then second of all, on PokerStars, following on from Ed, really, you've been pretty clear about the level of investment required. Peter, in your pre-recorded comments, I think I described the potential as huge.
Could you just share your own thoughts on what you think that business could become and what it looks like if and when it kind of gets restored to where you think it should be? Thank you.
Can I take the first one?
Yeah.
Just giving you a bit of color on the customers. I think there's two probably primary cohorts in here. One is obviously the fact that we've got gaming now live in two states, and we saw a good uptick in the gaming levels in both New Jersey and obviously in the new state of Pennsylvania. We saw some gains there on direct, and actually the direct acquisition into casino was very successful during the first half of the year. The second cohort is obviously we had success cross-selling into TVG and attracting new customers. We definitely saw some customers coming across, given the tracks and the retail outlets were shut. We definitely saw a cohort of customers coming across who would have probably been using those sort of methods of betting before and coming online, and we are very pleased with the level of market share we got.
In fact, the Belmont Stakes was $35 million of handle, which I think is the biggest day that TVG has ever had in its history, even bigger than any of our Kentucky Derby days. Two very different sort of cohorts of customers there that make up a good chunk of what's come in in the first half.
Look, I'd build on that. If you look at our strategy in the U.S., Michael, I think we have a distinct advantage in our ability to acquire customers nationally, which we can then cross-sell into sports betting and gaming. If I look back as to one of the reasons we bought FanDuel, because we actually tried some cross-selling of customers from our Draft business, which was the embryonic sort of DFS business we had into TVG, which was the only sort of legal sort of wagering business in America, we found that that was very successful. That gave us conviction to acquire FanDuel. What we have today, of course, that is the DFS business, which allows us to acquire customers nationally. We can also acquire customers almost nationally under the TVG and now FanDuel Racing brands.
Of course, we can also acquire customers using the FOX free-to-play mechanism of the Super 6. I think being able to bring those customers into our franchise and then ultimately cross-sell them into sports and gaming is very powerful. We know that competitors who haven't got that advantage find it very difficult to acquire customers cost-effectively, and that gives us a real advantage. I do think TVG has really shown its true colors for us in the second quarter, its ability to grow. I hope we can get more U.S. consumers interested in the product because actually, elsewhere in the world racing is a very important part of our mix, and it's always been smaller than I thought it should be in the U.S., and I hope we start to see that change.
In terms of your second question on PokerStars, I mean, we have to acknowledge that this is the level of investment that we want to put into the business. It's not something that's going to sort of lead to an immediate step change in growth. I mean, the windfall we saw of customers coming to the platform predominantly in the sort of second quarter through lockdown was something that was sort of unprecedented and certainly no one had ever expected. Before COVID arrived, we'd always expected. We certainly planned that we'd see the declines in the level of poker, and we hope we'll be able to drive good acquisition into the casino business. We thought there were opportunities around direct casino acquisition, and we'll see how well that works in the second half.
There are areas we do need to invest in the business, whether that's particularly around product tech, and other capabilities. The PokerStars business has suffered from a sort of lack of investment as The Stars Group was previously focused on growing their SBG business, BetEasy and FOX Bet . They had to make difficult choices about where they're going to deploy their capital. We're in a more fortunate position that we can invest behind all the opportunities we see. We'll do that. It'll take a while. When you look at the geographical spread of PokerStars, whilst it's got a much bigger international footprint than the one that Flutter had before, there's still many markets around the world that we're not particularly well represented in yet, which we want to pursue both organically and inorganically. We're excited about that.
It ought to be a much bigger business than it is, leveraging the poker, casino, and sports platforms.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Gavin. Thanks, Michael.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Gavin Kelleher from Goodbody. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning, Peter. Good morning, Jonathan. On the U.S., your U.S. guidance for the $150 million losses this year, obviously just under $20 million for H1. When I think about, obviously Pennsylvania going very well on the gaming side, New Jersey being a bit more mature this year and a lot more positive contribution there. The performance of TVG. When I look at $130 million, let's say, of investment losses in H2, are you taking an approach that in the new states you're going to launch in H2, are you going to be more aggressive in those states than you were in previous states from a marketing perspective? Is there anything on the operating cost line that's growing just to give us a bit of help around how we should build our U.S. models for H2 and beyond?
Just to put a bit of context on it for everybody in the call. Obviously, the pro forma losses for last year for the combined businesses would have been $82 million. That's the comparator we're working against for the full year.
Gavin, what I'd say about the U.S. is you need to remember the extreme seasonality there is in the business. The NFL is a massive driver of customer acquisition for our DFS business as well as our sports betting business. That has pretty profound implications from a customer acquisition perspective. There'll be a very significant step up in marketing activity in the second half of the year compared with the first half. Of course, there are many more states that we're planning to be opening in the second half of the year compared with last year. We know how important it is when states start to open up to invest hard to acquire customers.
You've heard me say before that we wish we'd spent more money historically in some of the states when they first opened up because the customer economics have ended up looking better than we'd imagined they would do. I think that is important context. I would point out, and you made the observation about New Jersey being more mature. We're very pleased with the way that New Jersey has matured. We talked in the past about the extent to which that business would be reaching a position where it'd be contribution positive. Of course that ought to be the case, everything else being equal. We need to remember we're in many more states than that now, and they're in the early investment phase. We've got good conviction about the ability for these states to mature and deliver very strong levels of contribution.
There are a vast number of states which are big opportunities for us now in the early investment stages, and we'll invest hard in them to take advantage of the opportunities.
I think the final point is this is about the volume of new players we expect to bring into the franchise as opposed to major changes to our expectation around CPAs, and that would sort of be backed up by what we've seen so far in the last period.
You basically think CPAs stay the same, but are you pushing harder in those new states versus what you would have done maybe six or 12 months ago?
Gavin, we have the same advantages in those states as we've had elsewhere, right? We have established DFS customer bases in those markets that we'll be looking to cross sell into. Of course, customers actually now are going to be on the same accounts and wallet as the DFS platform, which makes the customer journey much better. It's hard to read what some of our competitors may choose to do in the market. We will be pushing hard in the new states. We know that they'll be early in their investment cycle. We'll have to invest hard to acquire customers. We intend to sort of maintain our leadership position in the U.S., and we've got a lot of conviction about our ability to acquire customers at sensible prices and then grow these businesses into state when they mature to deliver meaningful levels of contribution.
Look, we are going to maintain the sort of discipline that we've demonstrated in the past, in terms of making sure that we're driving value into these businesses by looking at the relative CPAs against LTVs, and we'll continue to take the same approach. As Peter said, particularly in New Jersey, we probably should have gone a little bit harder given what we found out about the economics. As we refine those economic customer lifetime values more and more over time, we get more comfortable with our level of investment and retaining that level of discipline that you'd expect of us.
That's very clear and very positive. Thanks. Just a second question, and sorry to labor on PokerStars, given there's been a lot of questioning thus far. I'm sorry to ask a question about a short period, but just in terms of your graph you gave about PokerStars, it still looks like it is out of pre-COVID levels. That's my first one. Kind of linked to that, just how quickly increased marketing investments, obviously the GBP 50 million you're outlining for the group, I presume a big part of that is for the international division. Like, how quickly should we expect that to drive the revenue line from your experience?
Look, if you're referring to Chart nine, Gavin, you're right. When you look at where is the line on the right-hand side, is it above where the line was on the left-hand side? It is. We talk about the fact that the trends have moderated. It is particularly the case in poker. What we are pleased to see is that a number of the customers who we acquired in Q2, we have managed to keep within the franchise, particularly focused on casino. Even if they have not kept at poker because they have got less time now, they are able to go out and visit bars and restaurants, they are still engaged in some of our gaming activity. We need to remember there is the headwind of these compliance changes, which we flagged in the note, which will impact the business in the second half.
Of course, we are also choosing to put the additional marketing investment we flagged, which is for this international division. We're not entirely clear how quickly that will translate into growth for the business. We've never tried scale direct to casino acquisition and so we're not entirely sure how effective it'll be, but we hope it'll deliver for us.
As you can imagine, there's going to be a lot of test and learn in terms of putting some money into market, seeing how that direct sale goes, understanding player value, and then if we see that working well, we'll continue to scale up. If it's not working, we'll find a different way or a different market where we can invest. Again, discipline is a watch word.
Brilliant. Thanks a million, Jonathan. Thanks, Peter.
Thanks, Gavin.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Kiranjot Grewal from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Morning, guys. Just two questions from me, both from the U.S. Firstly, could you update us on your U.S. technology and where you are with it, how much tech integration we should expect in the U.S. and over what sort of timeframe? Also you mentioned that you wish you'd spent more on customer acquisition in the past in the U.S. for the states you've already launched. Can you potentially offer us some color on customer stickiness or churn in the U.S.? I know there's a lot of talk that a lot of money is being spent on re-winning customers. Maybe just more on dynamics around that. Thank you.
I think there's two points on that second question. I think our comment was primarily about the very first season two years ago of New Jersey and how we saw that panning out, in terms of the customer values in the very first state that we went into. I think we probably took a more considered approach in the second season when we had extra states on in the second half of last year and put a bit more money in. That comment of investing more was primarily around New Jersey. The retention levels are better than we see in some of our other markets and very positive, and when we look at those cohort charts, we get very comfortable with our level of investment that supports that customer lifetime value.
Yeah. I mean, look, in terms of the U.S. tech, we've now deployed our own account and wallet into the market. What that means is that effectively, customers log into our platform, and we own that end-to-end, which allows them to have one wallet and use the funds, albeit they need to be segregated appropriately between DFS, sports, and casino for the FanDuel business. It means that the cross-sell journey is much better from DFS to sports in the U.S. where it's allowed than it was before. Previously, customers would have had a DFS app and account and wallet, and then they would have had to have a separate sportsbook one. That was not a great customer journey. We've now integrated with the account wallet into one product.
We will be rolling out our own proprietary sports betting platform into states in the back half of this year, which will give us effectively end-to-end control over our tech in the U.S. market. Of course, we already use our own risk and trading capability, which is one of the reasons we have a better depth of market selections than our competitors do in the market. To the point about the customers and stuff and winning about, I think 80% of the volume of customers is back now on the platform with the resumption of sports. We are very pleased with the quality of business that we have in the U.S. and our strategy of acquiring DFS customers and cross-selling them, being able to leverage the DFS brand in terms of our ability to market effectively across the U.S. both nationally and then in states where sports betting is allowed.
It has been a really important part of our strategy, and we think that gives us a real advantage over the non-DFS operators.
That's really helpful. Just as you've touched on brand, have you thought out or given more thought on how you'll be positioning FanDuel versus FOX? Will this be used to target different sorts of customers, and will the product be different as well?
We're undertaking reviews in all of our divisions at the moment to work out what our go-to market strategy is with the different brands that we have. We like the fact that FOX has access to the Super 6 product with a tight integration they do with FOX Sports. We think that's a good way of acquiring customers on a national basis that can be then cross-sold into sports in a similar way to Sky Bet in the U.K. market. It typically will be a more recreational or super casual type of customers than possibly FanDuel's core bettors focus.
That's perfect. Thank you very much.
Thank you. May I just remind everyone, if you do have a question today, just key star, one on your telephone. Thank you. The next question is coming from Monique Pollard from Citi. Please go ahead, Monique.
Morning, everyone. Two questions from me again, if I can. Firstly, on Australia, obviously Australian results in the first half, incredibly strong. The chart in the presentation shows that the racing actives have been largely maintained as sports have reopened. I just wanted a view on whether those actives you think can be maintained medium term, and also what you're seeing in places like Victoria that have re-locked down. Secondly, just on responsible gambling, great to see that the staking per active has reduced in lockdown for your Sky Betting & Gaming brands. I just wanted to know if that was a similar trend you'd seen in other brands and whether you were comfortable with the player protection during lockdown.
I take the second point first because it's very important to us. I think when I look at the business that we operate and all of our brands across the world, I think we've made sure we've taken the right approach to looking after the welfare of our customers. Whilst we called out some of the stats for you for Sky Bet, we did the same for PokerStars. Rest assured, we took a very similar approach in all of our businesses around the world, very significant step ups in the levels of interventions with our customers, and I think we've taken the right actions there. With regards to Australia, you're right. We have seen some incredibly strong results and kudos to the team in Australia for such a strong performance in the first half.
Look, we're going to be fighting really hard to keep as many of those retail punters on our platform as we can. We're delighted that we're now able to provide customers under the Sportsbet brand with Sky Streaming, which we think will be an important component of that. When we look at the level of generosity and the quality of our products that we have available in the market, we think we can provide very compelling reasons to punters to stay with Sportsbet rather than go back to one of the retail monopolies. We obviously did benefit during the period from sports being shut down, but racing continued. You mentioned, the lockdown has been reinstated in Victoria which is very difficult for our colleagues who are predominantly based there and got a huge amount on at the moment.
It will impact the situation, but I think when I look at whether it's Australia or any other markets around the world, the business has proved to be incredibly resilient in the first half. In fact, if you actually look at our revenue growth in Q1 of 22%, it's the same as our revenue growth in Q2. Now, the configuration of it is very different, but I think it just shows the benefit of our diversification from a product and geographical perspective. Within Australia, I think we definitely have benefited from customers migrating from retail to online. We intend to keep as many of them as we possibly can. The team are working very hard on doing that.
I'd say the other point I'd add is Australia are the leading example of a business that's been able to maintain momentum in the underlying business, which is what we said we were going to try and do when we talked about the combination, the merger with TSG and delivering the change to integrate the businesses. They've done a phenomenal job, as have all the other teams. It's just the Aussies are slightly further along that track than the others. It's been a job really well done by the Aussies and by the other teams as well. Really fantastic.
Excellent. Just one follow-up on that. Just wanting to understand, obviously, the BetEasy customer migration you describe as imminent in your presentation. Of the racing actives that have been acquired in this period, how do they split brand to brand? How do we get some sense of is there any risk through the migration process?
Moni, we're not going to provide you with splits now. I think one of the important product attributes that BetEasy customers enjoy is Sky Racing, which is the streaming of racing coverage on the app. That's something we've been able to negotiate and launch for the Sportsbet brand. We hope that will help retain many of those BetEasy customers when they migrate across.
Excellent. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question is from Ed Young from MS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Oh, thank you. Just a follow-up on the technology. You very kindly went into a bit more detail on how you see the U.S. and obviously the new wallet you put in and the migration of the tech stack. Just to be clear, because there's been some announcements in the past over renewing a deal with IGT, which I think relates to the SSBTs and retail more or less, and with Scientific Games, which I understood to be relating to OpenBet presumably across your global platform. Just could you give your story about sort of owning it end to end and having full control of it? I appreciate these are only small components in the overall bit, but can you just give some clarity on describing what it's going to look like at the end, if you like?
Look, to some extent you've answered your own question there. IGT do provide us with technology for SSBTs in retail. The OpenBet component was part of our global sports betting stack. It's actually a very small aspect of the bet matching capability on the platform. Of course, as the owner of the world's largest exchange, we're very good at bet matching. We look at that as a very commodity part of the component. OpenBet is not a particularly important aspect of our platform and nor has it ever acted as a break in our ability to innovate. I think in the U.S. market the important pieces to own are the account and wallet because then you get the account and wallet and of course sports betting platform. That will allow us to innovate for customers in that market.
It's also worth just reminding you that we are going to continue to take this as an API-based approach so that what that effectively means is that the team in America will own their own version of the sports betting platform that they can make changes to. Now, of course, if they design, develop a fantastic feature, that will then become available to the teams in Europe if they choose to take it and vice versa. We hope that this is a method of us allowing us to maintain local focus but benefit from the group's global scale.
Very useful. Thank you.
Thank you. We have a question now from James Rowland Clark from Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Morning. Three questions, please. Just back on PokerStars provision again. You mentioned earlier trends have moderated, but they're still seeing growth currently. How does that look for poker versus casino? Is poker still delivering some growth? Secondly, on debt, do you have a timeline for potentially refinancing any debt and what the costs are? Also, what the savings could look like on that? The third question would be on regulation. Other operators have talked about their expectations as to how things may play out, but any thoughts on how you see U.K. regulation panning out for the next 3 to 12 months? Thank you.
Yeah, morning, James. Jonathan, do you want to have a go at the debt question?
Yeah, sure. I think there's a few points to consider here in terms of refinancing. Obviously, we've got the initial ratings from rating agencies, and we've got one of those, the three major rating agencies, one of those sits in the IG space and two in the position just below in that crossover credit space. We think that the actions we've taken during the year to strengthen the balance sheet, both in terms of the equity placing, plus the cash generated by the business will hopefully over time improve our ratings position overall. We also need to consider the credit markets, which have been in a very different place to the equity markets, to put it bluntly.
I think there'll be a confluence of events here, which means there'll be a time when hopefully we can move our ratings forward a bit and we get the credit markets in a better place. If we're going to replace some of this debt with longer-term debt, the last thing I want to do is tie in long-term suboptimal rates. It's a bit of a tight equation to play on that one, James, particularly on the TLB debt, the former Stars debt. Obviously, you've got that information around the rates on that debt in the presentation we provided that on the debt slide, and I'm sure that you guys can therefore make some estimates as to what a sort of investment grade AAA- sort of debt level cost would be. Then there's the $1 billion of senior unsecured notes
The make whole provisions of that stepped on significantly in July 2021, at which point it makes financial and economic sense for us to be looking at refinancing that element of the debt at that point or sometime shortly thereafter. There's a specific point about those $1 billion in notes, and then we'll take our opportunities on the TLB as and when we think that optimal point arises.
James, in terms of your other questions, when I look at the international division, I don't think it's that helpful to try and to tease apart the revenues attributable to poker as opposed to casino, because ultimately they're all coming from the same customer. One of the things that you'll see us trying to do is take a much more customer-centric view of this business.
Clearly, when no customers have been acquired directly into casino, they all are cross-sold from poker. You've got to be a little bit careful that you don't extrapolate from a poker business that may have gone down whilst casino has grown, because actually you could have effectively grown your ARPU from the same customers. What we are seeing is that the customers we brought into the business in the second quarter, we're really pleased with the extent to which they've stuck with us. We do know that people have more choice for their leisure time now than they did in lockdown. We had expected a large number of them to stop playing poker. We're pleased with the number which we've kept in the franchise playing casino with us.
The frustration is that our sports product probably isn't quite as good as we'd like it to be at this stage. That's one of the areas we'll be investing in. With regards to your question around regulation, clearly the U.K. government has got an awful lot on their plate at the moment. We do expect there to be some movements around the review of the Gambling Act in the U.K. market. Clearly it's something we've talked about in the past as we would welcome. We think the industry has actually been pretty impressive in terms of some of the measures that we've undertaken over the last few months, whether that's around restrictions of advertising or indeed the step up in interventions with customers in what's been a very tricky period. I think the industry's been doing a good job.
I think the timing with which the Gambling Act is reviewed is uncertain. We're looking forward to getting more clarity for our operating environment. I'd remind you, we have the two best recreational brands in the U.K. market, being Sky Bet and Paddy Power, and I think positions us very well for whatever changes may come down the track.
That's it.
I don't think there are any more questions coming through at this stage. Of course, I know that the IR team will be very happy to take any follow-ups that you have. There is a lot of information in the release and the presentation that we have uploaded onto the site this morning. There is a lot of moving parts in our numbers as a result of the transaction. I would just finish by saying how pleased I am with our first half performance, and appreciate you joining us for this call this morning. Thank you