Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2020 preliminary results presentation. I'm here in our Hammersmith office with Jonathan. And whilst it's a shame we can't be with you in person, hopefully with the rollout of vaccines, we'll be able to meet up in 3 d soon. The presentation that follows provides you with an overview of what has been a truly transformational year for the group. Later this morning, We'll host an analyst call to answer any questions you may have.
But let's get started and get straight into today's presentation. I'm going to start with a brief overview of the highlights for 2020. Jonathan will then take you through the strong financial performance of the group for the year. I'll then come back to provide an update on the performance of our business by division and how we are progressing against our strategic objectives. Starting with the highlights on slide 4 and there is no doubt that 2020 was a remarkable year for Flutter.
We completed our merger with The Stars Group in May, making us the largest online gaming operator globally, a business with unparalleled scale and geographic and product diversification. In December, we accelerated our buyout to the minority shareholders in Fanjul, something we were very keen to do given the scale of the opportunity we see in North America. We were delighted to be able to complete that transaction on highly attractive terms. We made sure that our balance sheet is fit for purpose, particularly given the opportunities we foresee to add additional businesses to the group over time. And as always we are very grateful for the ongoing support of our shareholder base in doing so.
We did all of these things whilst making sure that our first priority was the welfare of our customers and our colleagues as the world grapples with the ongoing pandemic. We mobilized quickly in March to support the well-being of our colleagues without availing government support schemes and we enhanced our safer gambling measures in response to lockdowns and the evolving preferences of our customers. I would like to say this opportunity to thank all my colleagues around the world for their commitment and resilience over the past year. The results we've announced this morning are testament to their hard work in the face of the unprecedented challenges facing the world at the moment. I'm pleased to say that our business is performing very well.
The growth we are delivering is being built on sustainable foundations with significant recreational customer growth in all our key regions. Throughout 2020, Our online AMP or average monthly players grew 19% with that growth accelerating during the year. Average player growth globally was 32% in H2. Merge integration continues to progress well and I will cover updates on strategy and progress across our business later in the presentation. You'll have seen that we have upgraded our cost synergy guidance this morning.
As we've said before our number one priority ensuring that the momentum in the business is not negatively impacted by integration work. But I'm pleased that we've been able to identify further efficiencies whilst maintaining strong momentum. While performance in all regions has been strong, Our ongoing leadership position in the U. S. Is particularly encouraging.
We are by a distance the largest online operator in the U. S. Today and the figures I will share with you later clearly demonstrate the positive trajectory for returns in that market. Before that though, I'll hand you over to Jonathan who's going to review the financial performance of the group during the year.
Thanks, Peter, and good morning, everyone. Just a few comments from me before we get into the numbers. We're now 10 months post merger. And as Peter mentioned, maintaining momentum was a key goal, and our numbers, I think, pay testament to the fact that we've managed to achieve that. Additionally, the benefits of diversification and scale could not be more evident than numbers.
Since joining forces in May, I've been really impressed with the way that our teams have gone about bringing the businesses together and also the collaboration that I've seen. This is a very exciting time for Flutter given the growth opportunities that our combination provides. In particular, we look forward to seeing how combining the various product and tech platforms will deliver growth over the next few years. We are also finding ways to do things more efficiently as reflected in our increased cost synergy expectations. I'll now move on to the numbers on Slide 6.
On a pro form a basis, the group delivered an excellent performance in 2020 with revenue growth of 28 percent to £5,300,000,000 We saw strong growth across both sports and gaming. Adjusted EBITDA was £1,200,000,000 excluding separately disclosed items, growing 16% from 2019. This growth in EBITDA was after an uplift of 36% in sales and marketing as we invested to drive customer growth. Excluding the U. S, Adjusted EBITDA was £1,400,000,000 an increase of 23%.
The group delivered strong positive cash flows with free cash flow after finance costs and separately disclosed items of 817,000,000 We ended the year with net debt of £2,800,000,000 Leverage was 2.3 times, down from 3.2 times at the time of merger. This reduction was due to our excellent free cash flow and our capital raises. Slide 7 shows the reported income statement. Clearly, the year on year revenue and profit growth reflect our combination with TSG on the 5th May 2020. I will discuss the drivers of our EBITDA performance on a pro form a basis in subsequent slides, and therefore, I will touch on items below EBITDA here.
The group's depreciation charge grew 47% year on year or 10% on a pro form a basis. This reflects the ongoing investment we are making in new features and products for our customers. Our expansion in the U. S. Also contributed to this increase.
Our interest expense for the year reflects the additional debt taken on as part of the TSG deal. Separately disclosed items of £565,000,000 were primarily non cash items. This was mainly for amortization of acquired intangibles of £432,000,000 mostly from the TSG merger. We also had cash SDIs of just over £120,000,000 from restructuring and integration costs as well as deal fees. Adjusted basic EPS Grew 35%, thanks to the TSG merger and the strong performance across our online divisions in the period.
On Slide 8, we disclose average monthly players, which is a new KPI that we will be reporting on a quarterly basis going forward. We have provided the KPIs and growth rates for each division by quarter in the appendices. Player volumes are obviously a key measure of the underlying performance
of the
business. This is particularly relevant for Flutter given the recreational nature of many of the brands in our portfolio. This slide is a powerful demonstration of of the momentum that we have delivered through 2020. We grew active customers across all divisions, delivering recreational customer growth, fundamental to building a sustainable business. Across the group, our online average monthly players in H1 and H2 2020 We're £5,600,000 £7,100,000 respectively.
This represents year on year growth of 6% in H1 and 32% in H2. In our core markets, we gained market share with PPB, SBG and Australia benefiting from the migration of retail customers to online. This was particularly pronounced in Australia where we added over 675,000 New customers. This was achieved while seamlessly completing the migration of BetEasy customers to Sports Bet in September. PPB benefited from additional marketing investment, which has been driving customer momentum with 28% growth in H2 and 34% growth in Q4.
Peter will bring you through some of the investments we have started to make in PokerStars. And while it's early days, it's pleasing to see The response of customers to this activity. In the U. S, player numbers were fantastic almost doubling from Q1 to Q4. New state openings were a big factor, but we are also continuing to see strong growth in existing states.
We hope that you find this additional level of insight into the business helpful. Slide 9 shows our revenue growth by division by quarter. You can see how momentum in the business has accelerated through the year driven by the excellent customer momentum covered on the previous slide. Revenue growth in Q1 and Q2 was 22%, rising to 30% in Q3 and to 37% in Q4. The benefit of the enhanced diversification of the combined group is clearly evident in the quarterly trends.
The revenue growth in PPB Online was primarily driven by customer growth with a small positive benefit from sports results. Q2 for PPB online was heavily impacted by COVID related event cancellations and these had a pronounced effect on the exchange in particular, which saw revenues decline 40% in H1. Our retail estate was closed on average 38% of the year with the impact clearly visible in Q2 and Q4. In SBG, more of the revenue uplift was driven by margin improvement with positive sports results materially benefiting across 2020, particularly in Q1 where SBG had easier comparatives following Cheltenham 2019. Overall, we saw net revenue margins increase by 4.50 basis points, of which 330 basis points was due to positive sports results.
This growth in margin was supplemented by strong levels of customer engagement across both sports and gaming, resulting in revenue growth of 32% for the year. In Australia, the 26% growth in players combined with a sports results benefit to deliver a 59% uplift in revenue. Sports Bet share of wallet clearly improved with retail shut. After the significant peak in activity for PokerStars during Q2, we continued to deliver revenue growth in H2 with strong customer engagement as a result of higher promotional and marketing investment, partially offset by the compliance measures we have taken to improve the sustainability of the business as mentioned at the time of the interim results. In the U.
S, We have experienced fantastic levels of growth in 2020. New state openings for both sports and gaming combined with strong growth in existing states have fueled the performance. The strength of Flutter's performance in 20 'twenty along with the investment decisions that we have made have provided us with great momentum into 2021. Slide 10 provides an EBITDA bridge for the group, excluding the U. S.
This takes you from Flutter Standalone 2019 EBITDA to the combined group's pro form a EBITDA in 2020. Moving from left To write, we add TSG's reported results for 2019, which equate to GBP 754,000,000 to flutter standalone results for last year. We provided details at our interims on certain costs that TSG historically treated as exceptional, but which Flutter treats its business as usual operating costs. The main items relate to the treatment of share based payments, professional and legal fees and lobbying costs and equate £46,000,000 in 2019, excluding the U. S.
A full reconciliation of this adjustment can be seen in the appendices. We then adjust for the adverse impact of foreign exchange movements during 2020, which gets us to a pro form a EBITDA for the combined group of 11 £39,000,000 for 2019. Our 2020 adjusted EBITDA of £1,400,000,000 It's an increase of 23%. SBG in Australia translated excellent revenue growth into high levels of profit growth. The PPB retail impact can be clearly seen with the 36% revenue reduction leading to lower profits Given the relatively fixed cost nature of retail and the fact that we continued to pay our staff throughout.
When open, our shops in the U. K. Performed strongly benefiting from the closure of other retail gambling venues and we continue to see a good opportunity for our well invested estate to win market share over time. PPB online saw a profit reduction in H1 but delivered a marginally higher EBITDA in H2 2020 over H2 2019 even after significant marketing and product investment to grow the customer base. For PokerStars, after an excellent first half, H2 saw us increase our level of investment in the business.
This investment was in promotional and marketing spend to drive growth in customers and in our product and tech platform. This increased investment reduced our profitability in H2. Moving to Slide 11, where I want to draw out a few key points. Firstly, operating leverage. Both SBG and Australia benefited from significant year on year profit margin enhancement during 2020 due to operating leverage, even as we continue to invest to improve customer propositions and support scale.
The strong revenue growth in both divisions led to a 600 basis point improvement in EBITDA margin helped by marketing efficiencies. Secondly, lower margins in PokerStars. In H2, We commenced our investment program to improve the brand, product and technology. Peter will cover more on these investments And the impacts on margins later in the presentation. Thirdly, corporate benefited from some rapid synergy delivery of £12,000,000 And finally, we can see the increase in U.
S. Investment losses to £170,000,000 Sales and marketing spend more than doubled to £348,000,000 in 2020, driving material customer acquisition. Other operating costs have been controlled growing 14% in 2020 despite the significant increase in the scale of the business achieved during the year. Moving to an update on synergies on Slide 12. We are increasing our cost synergy guidance from £140,000,000 at merger announcement to £170,000,000 by 2023.
This is net of reinvestment in some parts of the business such as reallocating technology teams in PokerStars. The increase in total synergies reflects primarily our decision to move to a single brand in Australia where customers Have already been migrated to Sports Bet's platform, meaning that the majority of decisions required to deliver Australian synergies have been taken with the benefits to be realized in 2021. Similarly, in corporate, much of the work to integrate these support functions is complete. For PokerStars and UK and I, there will be a more phased benefit over 20222023. This is due to the greater structural changes that are required in these divisions.
We are also announcing CapEx synergies of £20,000,000 from consolidation of Platforms and Infrastructure. The cash flow for 2020 is shown on a pro form a basis. Adjusted free cash flow Of £1,197,000,000 was generated from £1,231,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA. Capital expenditure was within our guided range at £252,000,000 We continue to invest in new features and products for our customers across all our online divisions in tandem with the expansion into more U. S.
States. Working capital has positively benefited from the year on year growth of the group, particularly in Q4. Creditors have increased significantly particularly in the area of direct costs where point of consumption taxes and product fees are typically paid in the quarter after revenue has been generated. We do expect that there will be a partial unwind of this position during 2021. Cash SDIs of €120,000,000 in the period primarily related to integration costs and professional fees from the combination with TSG.
Pro form a cash interest of £177,000,000 declined by £48,000,000 due to lower levels of debt and lower interest costs. The combined proceeds of the equity placings in May December raised £1,900,000,000 The £1,100,000,000 proceeds of the December raise were used to part fund the Fanjuel minority acquisition. Net debt at 31 December 2020 was £2,800,000,000 resulting in a leverage ratio of 2.3 times with more detail on this provided on the next slide. We retain a robust balance sheet with relatively long maturities on our facilities and significant headroom on our covenants. Following the merger and the refinancing of Flutter's facilities at that point, The group's combined cost of debt reduced 72 basis points to 4.18%.
Given the credit quality of flutter, we would expect to reduce the cost of debt further in the future. There is a step down in the make whole costs for the $1,000,000,000 of senior unsecured notes in July 2021. And this should present us with a good opportunity to refinance this element of the debt. Additionally, we will look at the opportunities around the TLB. Savings on these two elements of our debt will clearly depend on the state of the credit markets at the time of any refinancing and our ratings position.
Finally, from me, Slide 15 provides an update on current trading and some technical guidance. The earlier slides have highlighted the positive momentum that the business has carried forward into 2021. Trading has been strong with revenue growth of 36% to February 21 versus the comparable period in 2020 due to the strong momentum in our online divisions. Sports results have also been favorable versus expectations particularly in the U. K.
And Ireland. COVID restrictions continue to impact our retail business in the U. K. And Ireland. The latest government guidelines suggest that our U.
K. Shops may reopen in mid April, while it looks like it could be May at the earliest before we are able to reopen our Irish shops. For each month that our U. K. Estate is shut, We anticipate an EBITDA loss of £5,000,000 while in Ireland the monthly loss is expected to be £4,000,000 You may have seen there are proposals in Germany to introduce a 5.3% turnover tax on online poker and slots from July 1 this year.
While the tax is yet to be ratified, If it does come into effect, we believe it would effectively make the German online gaming market commercially unviable for regulated operators with the taxes being equivalent to significantly greater than 100% of gross revenue. In our view, the consequence of such a change would be to push consumer activity offshore and into the black market. We believe such an outcome runs contrary to the goals of the German authorities and we will be doing all we can to highlight this risk. The financial impact of such change would depend on how it is implemented and what if anything we could do to mitigate the charge. But our initial estimate is that the contribution impact Could be between £15,000,025,000,000 in 2021 if it comes into effect on July 1.
CapEx is expected to be approximately £300,000,000 in 2021 with ongoing product investment. While the effective tax rate for our group ex U. S. Is expected to be between 15% 17% as our share of profits from higher tax jurisdiction grows year on year. Finally, just as a reminder that we will start to report on our new four division basis from Q1 and we'll share historic pro form a data on these divisions in advance of our Q1 trading update.
And with that, I'll now hand back to Peter.
Thanks, Jonathan. Before providing a detailed update on strategic and operational progress across the group, I thought it'd be useful to take a step back and talk for a moment about how we think about investment in our sector today and why we believe scale is so important. We do not seek scale for scale's sake, but because of the advantages it bestows. In digital industries in particular Scale is critical. Market leaders enjoy superior economics, which in turn allow them to continuously reinvest in their product propositions and technology platforms.
If that investment is well executed with the end customer in mind It leads to an improved customer proposition. That in turn leads to market share gains and high revenue growth versus competitors. With a decent proportion of the group's cost base being relatively fixed in nature, we benefit from greater operating leverage, which provides us with the profit we need to reinvest in the business. This virtuous circle of investment has made Flutter what it is today and will underpin our approach as we continue to expand globally. An important but subtle point when thinking about how this impacts on our strategy it means that number one position is far superior and preferable to the other podium positions.
You'll see us striving for more gold medals. Slide 18 is one that you'd be very familiar with a summary of our 4 pillar strategy. I won't dwell on the progress we've made under each of these pillars here as I'll talk more about what we've done in the coming slides. Suffice it to say that we significantly accelerated delivery of our strategy across all four pillars during 2020, thanks in particular to the TSG transaction and the success we're continuing to deliver in America. Underpinning our entire strategy It's a determination to build a business that is truly sustainable by challenging ourselves to ensure that we introduce the highest standards of player protection.
Slide 19 covers the significant strides we've made in the area of Safer Gambling in 2020. We expanded the size of our safer gambling teams with increased investment in safer gambling technology across the group. We advocate a triple step approach to consumer protection that focuses on affordability. Firstly, we believe that our customers' affordability journey should begin at registration where we apply appropriate spend limits for customers with specific financial profiles. Our second is ongoing and extensive real time monitoring of all customers through our safer gambling controls.
And finally, we acknowledge the need for spending backstop if on the rare occasion the first two layers of protection miss someone at risk of harm. This will ensure runaway losses cannot rack up and we have a mechanism to step in and intervene at the right time. By employing such a system, we believe that meaningful player protections are in place. And already, We're seeing the benefits of this triple step approach. In PPB, 1 third of customers who have had a safer gambling interaction with I've gone on to use a safer gambling tool such as a deposit limit or time out.
At SBG, 40% of revenue in 2020 came from customers with a deposit limit already in place. And what I believe our 2020 performance demonstrates is that we can grow a sustainable business without a reliance on high value customers. Our revenue growth in H2 was almost entirely driven by growth in our recreational customer base. As part of the consultation period around the U. K.
Gambling Act, We are obviously shown these perspectives with the Gambling Act review. We have dedicated substantial internal resources to the review led by Ian Proctor and hope this advanced framework is designed that will protect vulnerable customers while allowing the many who enjoy a bet to continue to do so safely, particularly given the structural shifts occurring in our sector today. Nowhere has that shift been more strikingly evident than our core markets of the U. K, Ireland and Australia. The chart on the left hand side of slide 20 shows how changes in people's discretionary spend has affected some key parts of the leisure and entertainment sector in 2020.
As we referenced last year, the pandemic has led to an acceleration in the migration of customers from retail to online, a trend that we believe plays to the strengths of our recreational brands around the world. The U. K. Is a good example. While only one of our 3 brands has any retail presence at all Accounting for just 5% of shops, we are seeing Flutter Brands attract over 40% of the retail customers that have migrated online.
Encouragingly based on what we've seen historically when a customer migrates online they tend to get better product and value propositions than they've been used to in retail and our expectation is that many will remain online with us as lockdown ease and retail reopens. In the meantime, we are continuing to make substantial ongoing investment as we strive to deliver ongoing player growth like that seen across our core markets in H2. With structural trends working in our favor, There is a real onus on us to execute upon our strategy well. In the U. K.
And Ireland, where we will continue to operate 3 brands, Our focus is on leveraging expertise of both the SB and G and PPB teams to drive growth across all brands. We call this a complement and compete model and the early signs are very promising. I've been really impressed by the collaboration I've seen between the teams from day 1. Interestingly, as can be seen in the chart on the left hand side of slide 21, Player overlap between our brands is relatively low by industry standards. 2020 was a clear example of how our 2 recreational brands can deliver strong growth while the brand team share best ideas.
This allows us to deliver top line growth, to achieve greater scale and in turn delivers the efficiencies Jonathan spoke about earlier. In Australia, our enhanced scale and well executed migration of BetEasy customers across the Sportsbet is really paying off. The chart in the middle shows just how well the migration went with over 90% of BetEasy customers by value engaging on the Sportsbet platform in the 3 months post migration. The integration work in Australia is now complete. And as Jonathan referenced, the incremental synergy benefit from the move to 1 brand has also been material.
What is most pleasing is that in each of these core markets, we've grown market share whilst advancing our integration work. That was a key priority when we announced the deal with TSG and that remains the case today. I said at the time of our interim results that we'd share more detail with respect to our strategy for our international division at this results announcement and the next two slides do just that. Our international division comprises PokerStars, Ajara Vet and Betfair International. One initial priority was to determine what our brand strategy would be in international markets going forward.
The decision was relatively straightforward with PokerStars brand awareness in many key markets far exceeding that of Bear Fare. As such, it will be our lead international brand. Where Bear Fair enjoys strong recognition, we'll continue to promote the brand as a sports set proposition most notably in Spain, Italy and LatAm. In August, we spoke about how we would need to significantly increase our level of investment in the PokerStars business after years of underinvestment in technology, brand and product. That investment will be multi year and we'll focus on stabilizing the tech platform, modernizing the poker product, simplifying customer journeys and improving our digital marketing capabilities.
We know that when we invest in marketing and player generosity customers respond over time so we intend to hold these levels of investment. The good news for us as we have some terrific assets at our disposal with which to grow the business and direct casino investment is a key tenant of our new strategy for the business. The quality of our casino product is excellent. We have over 1500 titles of which 100 are proprietary designed by our own in house studios and we have the expertise to deliver strong direct casino acquisition in a way that PokerStars has not in the past. We are already seeing the benefits of early investment in direct acquisition with the number of direct casino activations traveling from 2019 to 2020.
This partially drove the 37% increase in PokerStars casino revenue in 2020. And while, of course, lockdowns have played a big part in driving the growth. We're seeing encouraging signs when it comes to retention on the casino side of the business. The final part of our international strategy centers on pursuing further bolt on acquisitions that allow us to expand the size of our addressable market. We see good opportunities to expand our international presence further through M and A, encouraged by the success of our Ajara Bet acquisition since we acquired that business in early 2019.
Where we can find strong national players with well recognized brands and competitive moats around their businesses, We will seek to add them to the Flutter portfolio. Our experience with the Jarabette is that the group can turbocharge the growth of businesses like it by providing operational expertise and incremental product. A recent example of the types of investments we will look to make is our acquisition of initial 50.1 percent stake in the Indian online rummy and DFS operator, Junglee. Junglee provides skill based games in India and whilst its core product offering today is Rummy, we see an opportunity to leverage the group's expertise in DFS to grow that product in India also. As has been the case with other acquisitions we've completed in recent years, The deal is structured in a way whereby we can increase our holding to 100% over time through use of put and call options.
We will continue to be disciplined in the investments that we make and see good prospects for future investments around the world. Now turning to America. The U. S. Remains the most exciting market opportunity for the group today.
Our U. S. Execution remains very encouraging. We have retained our position as the number one player in the market. And it is clear that the size of the prize is getting bigger all the time.
We now believe that Flutter's total addressable market in the U. S. It will be over $20,000,000,000 in 2025. That is a significant increase from the $12,000,000,000 estimate that we shared previously. This increase reflects the trends we're seeing in the states in which we're already operating, including a higher customer spend, Better than expected retention rates across both sportsbook and casino and higher levels of cross sell.
These trends result in higher customer values increasing the prospective value of the states we expect to regulate. The increased TAM also reflects our expectations around continued favorable regulatory momentum. We saw such a change in Illinois during 2020 with the suspension of in person player registration following the outbreak of the pandemic. And we anticipate further positive change to come as more states look to address budget deficits by seeking new sources of tax revenue. The regulation of sports betting and gaming is increasingly seen as a win win by states who can better protect consumers whilst collecting tax revenues at the same time.
Our new estimate at TAM assumes that the addressable population for sportsbook and gaming will be 65% and 16% respectively, with the biggest change being the addition of Texas to the list of states that we think will regulate sports betting over time. It is important to note that $20,000,000,000 is not a ceiling on this market size as we believe there'll be a long runway of growth for existing states beyond 2025. Furthermore, the opportunity for pharyngeal increasingly looks like it could extend outside the U. S. With the recent regulatory progress in Canada.
In the long run, there's a path to a total North American TAM of more than $34,000,000,000 making it critical that we continue to execute well in this market. For us, podium position in America is not our core objective. Ultimately, we believe that being number 1 in a market of this size can bring disproportionate benefits, which is why we are so determined to invest to win that gold medal. Jonathan outlined how we more than doubled our marketing spend in 2020 in the U. S.
To £348,000,000 and it's important to recognize that a key reason we are able to make this significant investment is due to the scale an operating leverage we already enjoy. We finished the year with a 40% share of the sports betting market, a 20% share of the online gaming market and a 31% share overall. We are the 1st operator to reach the milestone of over $1,000,000,000 in gross gaming revenues and we believe our scale can help us to compound our advantage as we continue to expand in this market. On the next slide, we provide an update on how the returns profile is developing for us in America. In March 2019 at our U.
S. Investor Day, we said we expected each sportsbook state would follow a J curve returns profile with an upfront investment in the initial years followed by this investment being paid back over time. The chart on the left hand side of slide 20 sets out what the J curve now looks like for all customers we acquired in 2018 2019 from the launch of our first sportsbook in New Jersey and subsequent launches in Pennsylvania, in West Virginia and in Indiana. The dark blue line shows the cumulative contribution from these As a reminder contribution is revenue less cost of sales and marketing and is a measure of profitability before deduction of fixed costs which will be spread over an increasing number of states over time. The 2018 2019 customer care cohorts Generated over $90,000,000 in positive contribution June 2020.
This is after in year retention investments of almost $100,000,000 in free bets and marketing spend. There are 2 key drivers of this positive contribution. The first was our ability to acquire early cohorts of customers at scale by leveraging our DFS database. The database brings with it a structural cost advantage. We also invested early in direct acquisition, leveraging the strength of the Fanjul brand across the U.
S. The second has been our ability to keep our customers engaged through offering a superior product. The fact we can offer the best sports betting products in the market means that we're seeing retention rates more than 1.8 times the average of our mature brands in the U. K. This increases the lifetime value of our customers.
The contribution we generated from these early customers is helping us fund The virtuous circle of reinvestments in those states. We more than doubled our customer base in these states in 2020. New Jersey, the most mature state, generated a total contribution of over $50,000,000 in 2020, which funded customer acquisition elsewhere. What this tells us is that early advantage could compound our strength in states yet to come. Slide 26 lays out clearly where our U.
S. Business stands today. In 2020, our revenue was 1.4 times that of our next nearest competitor and we exceeded the revenues of the number 2 and number 3 online players in the market combined. We were the market leading operator in both sportsbook and gaming in Q4 with a 40% and 20% market share respectively. 2020 was also a record breaking year for our TVG business as we saw the same structural trends play out in the U.
S. As in other core markets. Our amps in TBG increased by 60% during 2020, and we doubled our market share to 20% of the overall racing market. Our DFS business, which is an important component of our customer acquisition funnel, was challenged in the first half due to COVID. However, we stepped up our investment in DFS generosity and are now seeing a halo benefit from the increased investment in the Fanjul brand more broadly.
Following the return of sports in H2, DFS activations were up 23% year on year with average monthly players up 15%. In free to play, our Simpler 6 product now has a player base of over 4,400,000 with more than 1,500,000 active on a weekly basis during the NFL season. Since the season started, the SuperSix app has consistently been in the top 5 most downloaded free sports apps and we have seen around a quarter of our FOX Bet Sportsbook customers coming from the Super6 database. We continue to innovate when it comes to product and leverage Flutter Group capabilities. A good example is our same game Parley product, which was designed in Australia and shared across the Flutter Group.
This is a higher margin product, meaning as more customers choose to play the same game parlay, We see an improvement in our overall net win margin. This is demonstrated through the year on year increase we saw in our win margin during 2020 despite the significant levels of investment we made in bonuses and free bets. This ensures we combine providing players with the cutting edge products they enjoy whilst also improving the returns we see within the business. And we continue to have the broadest range of betting markets and best in play offerings in the market. With Fanjul now sitting on our own accounts and wallet, we've been able to unlock further cross sell potential via smoother customer journeys.
And we've begun migrating individual states to our own in house sports betting platform with our second state now successfully complete and are targeting the start of the 2021 NFL season to complete this migration. This will bring increased flexibility and stability to our platforms and further expand the features we can offer our sports betting customers. The final U. S. Slide shows how we're performing year to date.
You can see on the left hand side of the slide that 2021 is off to a phenomenal start with Sportsbook and Casino Cast acquisition in the 1st 2 months already close to 90% of our acquisition for the whole of 2020. We are continuing to refine our state launch playbook and are now live in both Michigan and Virginia bringing our state tally to 10 for online sportsbook and 3 for gaming. We've been really pleased with our performance to date in these states. We had a leading 28% share of Sports Handler Michigan in January with a focus on maximizing customer acquisition in those initial days post launch. We had a significant number of players register with our sports book before we went live in Michigan and we currently have more customers active on our gaming platforms in that state than we do in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, despite only being live for less than 6 weeks.
Just as in other markets, Marketing sporting events are key customer acquisition opportunities and the Super Bowl was no different in 2021. We acquired more customers across our sportsbook and gaming businesses during Super Bowl week than we acquired in all of 2019. While the Fanjul Sportsbook app was ranked number 3 in the U. S. App Store across all free download apps on the day itself.
The power of our customer acquisition funnel remains clear. 41% of our customers since we originally launched in 2018 I've come from our daily fantasy sports database. Direct acquisition though is also strong with the Fanjul branding drawing 54% on prompted brand awareness in 2020. What has surprised us further as the ongoing growth in more mature states. We acquired over 100,000 new customers during Super Bowl week in states that were launched before 2020.
And overall, we had over 1,000,000 paid customers active on Super Bowl Sunday across our platforms and we're determined to continue to build on this success. So in summary, I'm delighted with our performance in 2020. We advanced all of our key strategic objectives, protected the momentum in the business and have positioned the group well for further growth opportunities. We are more focused than ever on ensuring that our business is being built on sustainable foundations. And as Jonathan mentioned, 2021 has started well with good momentum across the group.
And while it is early days, we look forward to the rest of the year with confidence. Thank you for listening. I look forward to joining you all shortly to answer your questions.