Earnings Labs

Flutter Entertainment plc (FLUT)

Q4 2019 Earnings Call· Sat, Feb 29, 2020

$108.27

-2.40%

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Transcript

Peter Jackson

Management

I’m going to start by giving you a brief overview of the headline developments of the group over last year. I then want to talk for a few minutes about the changes we’re making to put responsible gambling at the heart of what we do and the regulatory backdrop for our business and the sector more broadly. Jonathan will then go through our 2019 financial results before handing over to Matt, who will provide an updated view on the U.S. market and the progress we’re making there. It’s almost a year since our U.S. Capital Markets Day, and a lot has happened in the U.S. in that time. So it’s great to have Matt here. I’ll then talk about the performance of our core PPB online and Sportsbet businesses before giving you a brief update on our proposed combination with the Stars Group. We’ll then open up for Q&A. Turning to Slide 4. I can work the slides – here we are. It’s fair to say that 2019 was a very busy year for Flutter as we made progress against all four pillars of our strategy. In the year of big developments, the standout one was obviously announcements of our proposed combination with The Stars Group, which I’ll speak about at the end. Aside from that deal, in Europe, we added a podium position to our portfolio with the acquisition of Adjarabet in February and have been very encouraged by how well that business has performed in Georgia and Armenia since. In the U.S., performance has exceeded our expectations across the board. We became the market leader in both the online sport betting and online gaming. It is a market which I continue to believe were the biggest – to be the biggest legal market in the world. We saw…

Jonathan Hill

Management

All right. Thanks, Peter, and good morning, everybody. As you can see, it’s been a pretty busy year in 2019. There’s a lot to get through, so I’ll kick straight into the numbers. I’m pleased to say, to start with, that we achieved our results in line with guidance. Our revenue in 2019 increased by 14% to GBP2.1 billion, benefiting from a mixture of good organic growth, our U.S. sports betting expansion and the acquisition of Adjarabet. Group delivered underlying EBITDA of GBP385 million on a pre-IFRS 16 basis. The year-on-year decline of GBP66 million reflects the additional taxes and regulatory changes introduced during 2019, which combined, totaled GBP107 million and also reflected GBP26 million of additional U.S. investment losses as we expand our business there. As a result, reported profit before tax reduced to GBP336 million from GBP119 million in the prior year, and reported EPS was 183p, 24% lower than 2018. The balance sheet remains in a strong position with net debt at the year-end of GBP265 million, equating to a leverage ratio of 0.7 times. And in line with the guidance provided at the time of the Stars combination announcement, we are proposing to maintain the full year dividend at 200p per share. Okay. Moving to Slide 8, the bridge in this slide provides us, hopefully, with a better view of what’s happening in the underlying business. To make this comparable, this chart is prepared on a pre-IFRS 16 basis and excludes the U.S. So just starting from the left of the bridge to the right, firstly, we have adjusted the base for the FX changes, and then we bring in the pro forma Adjarabet numbers. As I said on the previous slide, the impact of the regulatory and tax changes was GBP107 million, consistent with our…

Matt King

Management

Thanks, Jonathan. Great to be here today. Very excited to tell you our story in the U.S. Frankly, it’s been almost a year since I saw a number of you at the Meadowlands for our Capital Markets Day. By way of introduction, I’m Matt King, I’m the CEO of FanDuel Group. There’s lots of moving pieces going on in the U.S. today. So what we thought we would do is focus on a couple of things. One, provide a legislative update in terms of where we’re seeing progress and then also what that means in terms of our estimate for the medium-term size of the market for us. And then we’ll talk to you in terms of where we’ve gotten to in – with market access, which is obviously critically important to building a large business there. Then we’ll move – go on to the critical success factors that we believe are important to win the market long term and how we’re leveraging the assets at the lighter group to make sure that we’re successful. And then last, we’ll run through our performance to date and demonstration of the – how the strategy is working in the action. So if we go to Slide 17, this is the legislative update. Simply put, we’re very encouraged by the legislative progress and momentum to date. In 2019 alone, states accounting for 14% of the U.S. population passed legislation for online sports betting. This brings the total number of states that have passed sports betting legislation to 14, and that represents 24% of the U.S. population. On the gaming side, five states have passed online casino legislation, and that equates to about 10.5% of the population. Last March, we explained to you that there – you should expect a time lag between the…

Peter Jackson

Management

Thank you, Matt. As I told my kids last year when we visited the U.S., everything is big in America. I’ll now talk to you about developments in the rest of the world. We’re on to Slide 25. If I can make this work – here we are. So firstly, let’s look at Paddy Power, and I’ll try to steer clear of talking about the rugby results. I’ve been really pleased with the performance of Paddy Power brand during 2019. It continues to resonate strongly with the recreational customers. Our punters believe that Paddy Power provides them with the best offers and promotions in the market and as product that’s the easiest to understand compared to the other operators. Since 2018, we’ve continued to improve our gaming proposition with new content and better integrations. And by Q4, our customers are telling us that Paddy Power had the best games on offer compared to our competitors. Our daily jackpots ad campaign, fronted by Jose Mourinho, helped increase our direct gaming and customer acquisition and the average number of customers that regularly use our gaming products. There’s good innovation on the sports betting side, too. During the year, we expanded our popular acca insurance product to all markets, and we’re the only operator to operate on four leg accumulators and on all sports outside racing. The focus on recreational customers is leading to an increase in the popularity of accumulated bets. The higher margin in this product contributed to the increase in our expected margin within PPB. You’ve heard Dan Taylor talk before about how he thinks the number of average daily active customers is the right metric to track the underlying performance of our business. In 2019, excluding the World Cup, we delivered 12% increase in daily actives across our sportsbook…

Q - Michael Mitchell

Management

Thank you. Michael Mitchell from Davy. Two on U.S., if I could. In Meadowlands, the – you helpfully laid out that the $6 billion sports betting market probably equated to something like $600 million of contribution profit – across all product verticals. I wonder, could you help us with the same math with the upgraded medium-term market assumption?

Peter Jackson

Management

I’m sure you can put the numbers into the spreadsheet, Michael.

Michael Mitchell

Management

Okay. Well, I guess my question is, is it as simple as putting math into the spreadsheet? Or are things like greater than expected spend versus where we were 12 months ago, better churn, et cetera, et cetera? Have they changed the kind of broader economic opportunity?

Peter Jackson

Management

We’re going to share with you what we’ve done. You guys, I think, can extrapolate the data that you saw, which we’re very pleased with where we are as a business in that market. We’ll continue to fight for share, and we’ll continue to see how that market evolves. We are 18 months actually into the sports betting market. So we’re not going to crystal ball gaze at this point, but we’re hopefully giving you some more data, some more clarity on what’s happening, and certainly is, hopefully, we get through some of these J – positive J curve moves. Hopefully, that will enable you guys to be able to model that better in the future. So we’re doing what we can. I mean the one area that I think there’s a degree of the noise around is the cost of certain market access. And I think that is something which is difficult. Matt, you want to answer or just comment on that?

Matt King

Management

Look, I mean I think just as a guidance point, as we’ve gone through all the market access, you can use a simplifying assumption of a little less than 4% of GGR would be market access. That’s the way to do it. I wouldn’t say fundamentally, cost basis are changing differently than we expect and I think that’s one that’s settling down. And we probably knew less of that a year ago.

Michael Mitchell

Management

And then into that, question number two. Could you just speak a bit more, and we appreciate its early days. But in terms of churn rates and retention rates that you’ve seen to date, what that signals to you on a – kind of on a medium-term basis for the U.S. versus more mature markets?

Matt King

Management

I think it’s still really early days. If you think about being in the market for 18 months, the most important kind of churn rate we look at is this year-over-year reactivation, because if I acquire a lot of people in the NFL season, obviously, there’s the week-over-week and month-over-month. But what you really want to know is how many people did I acquire in one year to come back the second year. And we have a very limited data set on that because you really just have a little bit of NFL acquisition in New Jersey. I’d probably say, directionally, the way to think about it is the curves that we’re seeing look a lot more like Sportsbet than they do Europe. It’s probably the simplest way to think about it.

Jonathan Hill

Management

I’d add. I mean look, the retention curves we’re seeing in the U.S., the best that we see anywhere else in the business today. And I’d also just remind you that typically, when these markets open up, the customers you acquire start with – end up being ultimately the most viable players.

Michael Mitchell

Management

Great. Thank you.

Gavin Kelleher

Management

Good morning. Gavin Kelleher from Goodbody. Just two for me. On the U.S., Matt, I appreciate you may not answer this, but you’ve given about 18 to…

Matt King

Management

Let me get that.

Gavin Kelleher

Management

You’ve given the 18- to 30-month positive contribution in New Jersey. Given what you’re seeing on CPAs, they seem below $250 per person, given what you’re seeing on casino spend in Pennsylvania in such an early period of time. Do you think the new markets and obviously, the scaling and kind of scale economic benefits, you’ll see a kind of a closer to 18-month contribution positive than 30 in new states? Or how do you see that ending going forward?

Jonathan Hill

Management

I think it depends whether you’ve got one product, two products. It depend on tax rates, and it will depend on the competitive landscapes we see in each of the states. It’s really every state is going to be different is all we know. We’ve got some states, which are going to go straight to mobile-only and there are no casinos in existence. So it’s very difficult to say.

Peter Jackson

Management

The thing I’d add, Gavin, is operating in the U.S. is going to require real scale. And I mean the ability for Matt with opening up in two or three new markets just really states that here, we don’t need to make our business just 3 times bigger. We need to add appropriate numbers of colleagues to support customer services as we serve scale. That marketing team isn’t going to grow enormously. We’ve got good operating leverage in the business, and that’s something which is really important.

Gavin Kelleher

Management

Perfect. And so I just – I missed the first 10 minutes. Apologies if I’m late, and you may have talked about this in your responsible gambling slide at the start of the deck. Just on everything you’re doing with sustainability and responsible gambling in the core European online business, is it fair to say that in the last three or four years, your exposure to higher staking and gaming has not really reduced over that period? Or is it broadly the same as three or four years ago?

Peter Jackson

Management

I mean, we’re talking – taking you through the Paddy Power and Betfair size and energies. Just now I just referenced the fact that within Paddy Power, we’ve got the recreational, customer growth has been there to offset some of the challenges we’ve seen in high volume, and that’s not been the case in Betfair. So undoubtedly, we’ve seen that part of the market be impacted yet.

Gavin Kelleher

Management

Okay. And you’re not going to put – I know this morning, Stars Group put a kind of number on the revenue they lost from their responsible gambling measures last year. You’re not going to…

Peter Jackson

Management

No, we’re not going to sit and try and work out what we could have had if we haven’t done something differently. We can show you what we do.

Gavin Kelleher

Management

Perfect. Sure. Thanks.

Daria Fomina

Management

Daria Fomina, Goldman Sachs. I have a quick question on U.S. again. Can you talk a little bit about the difference in strategy between the U.S. DRAFT in the U.S.? You gave us the data on customer acquisition costs. I think it’s slightly higher. Just what is – I’m trying to split the hair here. Just bigger picture, is it identical? We see some – or particularly different – targeting different customer cohorts? Or anything on that front would be helpful.

Matt King

Management

You’re saying relative to Draftkings?

Daria Fomina

Management

Draftkings. Sorry, yes, Draftkings.

Matt King

Management

I think, certainly, there’s a lot that’s similar. We’re both kind of DFS-led brands. I think there are some differences that are reflective of the access we have to the global group. So if you look at our risk and trading strategy, I’d say it’s more advanced and more sophisticated, particularly in terms of market breadth as well as market innovation around things like same-game parlays, and that’s a direct result of being able to access group resources versus outsourcing your risk and trading. I think the second thing that would be tied back to the group capabilities would be the retail expertise. And so if you look at the scaling of our retail footprint, particularly the ability to execute on that marquee retail locations, a lot of that comes from the ability to leverage group infrastructure and expertise around retail that Draftkings wouldn’t have access to. And so I think there are some places where the group has really helped us differentiate the strategy.

Ed Young

Management

Ed Young from Morgan Stanley. Two for me as well. The first one is on sports margins. Peter, you spoke about the sort of structural improvements you’re getting. You mentioned a number of times, accas and multiple bets becoming more important to the mix. Is there a reason why that margin shouldn’t structurally continue to improve, given the focus on recreational customers? I noticed that there’s obviously overinflation in the UK and Australia and there’s the pricing with sort of one area, I think, not in [indiscernible] side. So is there any sort of structural tailwind to margins?

Peter Jackson

Management

Give us the second one.

Ed Young

Management

And the second one, just on the credit card impact. I think previous discussions with a number of payers over the last sort of 6 to 12 months have been the credit card deposits of 4% to 5%. A lot of that could be mitigated. What is it exactly about the way the regulations are hitting that means that we’re now looking at a regulatory impact of the size you’ve outlined? If you could help us understand what does that means please?

Peter Jackson

Management

Matt, you want to pick it up?

Matt King

Management

Yes, I’ll certainly pick up the second of those. We’ve historically around 1.5% of customers are using credit cards only. It’s 6.5%, 7% of overall deposits come from credit cards. We still think that the mitigations we expect to take place would lead to a 50% to 60% reduction in that, which gets you to this guidance of $20 million to $25 million. I mean these are estimates for the actual rules and regulations come into play. So we’re just trying to give a size and shape to it. So I think it gets us to around 3% of the revenue is lost rather than the 6.5% to 7%. And so that’s roughly where we are. It is an estimate today, and we’ll see how it pans out, and we’ll try and help you understand better when we see the actual regulation coming in and seeing the impact on customer deposits.

Peter Jackson

Management

And regarding the point of our sports margin, I think you have to look at it market by market. And if we take our business in Australia, we have made some small changes to some margination around – particularly racing. We’ve introduced the same-race multis, which improves margin in racing. We have seen some changes towards the further accas in Sportsbet. So – but they can’t keep going those things, right? We’ve done it. And so I think I wouldn’t expect that trend to continue. I think we’re also in a more stable point.

Jonathan Hill

Management

And also, the recreational mix is already very high. So you’re not going to see a kind of core to recreational benefit in Australia.

Peter Jackson

Management

Yes. In Paddy, we’re starting to that point of recreational. In Paddy, we’re starting to see the benefits of having a greater recreational mix. And we’re doing more to try encourage and drive customers towards those sort of accas. We haven’t launched the same race multi-products yet in the UK. So there’s stuff that we could do in the future, but – however, these things are very important. But I think it’s – particularly in Australia, it’s more stable. And in the UK, what we’re seeing is just it’s more sort of a mix effect coming between the customer types and some better. The – whilst we didn’t talk about margins in the U.S., I mean I think one of the things that Matt referenced earlier was the benefits we’re getting from the group technology. So we do have quite good penetration in terms of parlays, as we call multis in the U.S. I think that is quite important in terms of supporting our margin in the U.S. market.

Richard Stuber

Management

Richard Stuber from Numis. Two questions as well. First, on responsible gambling, you mentioned at the top, I mean sort we’re reassured by the KPIs, just saying. Could you just elaborate exactly which KPIs you’re tracking? Do you have any specific targets on any of those? And would you be reporting those on a – sort of an interim basis? And the second question is on the U.S. Is there any sort of evidence to suggest that customers are having some multiple accounts? I know you talked about some retention. But I guess that doesn’t include the people with two, three, four accounts, and obviously are chasing bonuses. Do you see anything like that?

Peter Jackson

Management

Do you want to take the U.S. point now, Matt?

Matt King

Management

Yes. I think generally, we’re seeing customers to be far more loyal than they would be in Europe. You see – and some of that comes from – it’s hard to sign up for an account, so there’s just more friction for a traditional account. We certainly expect you’ll start to see, over the medium term, when people experiment a little bit more with other brands and these multiple brands. But we think it’s going to be likely to be kind of more loyal customer base than you might see

Peter Jackson

Management

Yes, Richard, regarding this – the RG stuff, I mean there’s a couple of things I’d highlight in it. First of all, Jonathan and I, and indeed all of the management and the seniors folks of the business here, we will have RG measures included in our bonus scheme. So I think it is important that, that is there. And if it will be the case if Jonathan and I, and you’ll see that when the – with the publication of the annual report. If you look at the RNS, you can see some detail of what we’re doing from an operation on Page 3 in terms of some of the important aspects of what we’re doing. At the end, we can sort of highlight in there that the 84% increase in customers choosing to set the limits and, at the same time, delivering a 56% increase in real-time contact with customer service. Some of those KPIs are very important here. I don’t think we’re going to be in a situation where it’s publishing almost on a regular basis, but as it’s – I hope – I wish I did mention.

Ivor Jones

Management

Good morning. Ivor Jones from Peel Hunt. Can I just understand what’s happened on Exchange and what the risk is from here? Are you saying you’ve excluded B2B customers of the Exchange that were not KYCing their underlying customers? And so is that washed out of the Exchange now that you now know who the underlying users are? And the second thing was, you talked about wanting to see improved RG standards around VIP. That was one of the schemes. That was one of things you’re going to put to your proposal to the Gambling Commission. And how big is VIP for platter? And what is it that you want to see change in relation to the IP schemes? Thank you.

Peter Jackson

Operator

Thank you, Ivor. In terms of – I’ll pick up the RG sense around the VIPs. I mean it’s one of the three important areas of focus from the Gambling Commission, and we’re working very closely with them on supporting their work there. And it is something which I think is important to deal with. From my perspective, a lot of the concerns that people have around the VIP scheme stem from the fact that people assume the VIP scheme there is in place to encourage customers to spend more money that they can afford. And it is why you hear me talk a lot about affordability, because I think that’s absolutely the most important thing that we can get right in this – for ourselves and across the sector. And so that is the way in which we will be focusing and thinking about VIPs. As it happens within our business, our key account managers who manage the – our higher-value customers, they are not incentivized to the amount of money that those customers are spending with us. So I think that is important. And it’s again another way of ensuring that we don’t get on the wrong side of that affordability point. In terms of your first question around the Exchange, as I said earlier, we run this ongoing review of customers in all of our businesses all around the world. And if we find that customers are not meeting asked numbers, then we will make sure that we – they’ll be happy trading with us. And if they do start to meet our standards, we’ll allow them to continue trading with us.

Simon Davies

Analyst

Good morning. Simon Davies from Deutsche. Two for me, both on the U.S. Firstly, you talked about increased use of proprietary technology during the course of 2020. Can you give us an indication of what products you might introduce then? And secondly, in terms of New Jersey, obviously, impressive to move into profit 2020. Can you give an indication of the level of marketing spend that you expect as a percentage of revenue now that it’s beginning to mature a little?

Jonathan Hill

Management

We’re just on the second question, Simon. We’re not going to start breaking down marketing spend by individual state. But what you can expect is that what we said in the analysis we did around 18 to 30 months which is what we’re expecting in New Jersey, is that as we get more and more customers who become – retaining customers rather than new customers, that upfront CPA of marketing spend plus promotional spend to drive people into the business, will reduce as a proportion. And what you’ll see is that proportion getting better. We aren’t going to split out the individual states at this point. But the sort of analysis that we gave you over the long term, we will be moving from a much higher level of promotional and marketing spend to – towards a more long-term state. And that’s one of the things that benefits because of that ongoing revenue stream making up a greater proportion of revenues than new revenues.

Peter Jackson

Operator

And Simon, I’d also add that when you think about some of the stats that match out with you in terms of the proportion of the U.S. population that are going to be covered by state, which helps sports betting in place, we’re not far off the point where, at some point down the chart, we’ll be able to run much more national sort of advertising, so trying obviously to work out how this all cuts out by state will be very difficult. I mean, you’ve seen the volume of marketing spend that we had in 2019, we shared that with you a minute there. I think what is important is to keep driving the brand and acquiring customers into our DFS business. And our other businesses are low cost, we can then get a contribution from those businesses. We even cross-sell into sports betting when the states open up. And even for customers who are new to franchise have the recognition and understanding of our brand, which gives us those structurally lower acquisition costs, and that’s the model we think about. Matt, do you want to declare the tech stuff?

Matt King

Management

Yes, on the tech stuff, most of what we’re focused on is a big drop of new technology for NFL Season start. So you see all the proprietary technology get launched kind of leading into the NFL. That will obviously be balanced with the tech lift of launching in new states. And so you’ll see kind of both of those things happening in parallel.

Peter Jackson

Operator

Today, we have our own wallet live in the U.S. We’re using our proprietary risk trading technology. So we – and those – for those reasons, we have better depth in markets and pricing capabilities than you see other people in the market. And we will always just keep pushing here. We’ve got – I think we’ve got a couple of questions coming on the phone. So I don’t quite know how we do that in here.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Your first question on the telephone comes from the line of Monique Pollard, Citi. Please go ahead, Monique. You’re live in the call.

Monique Pollard

Analyst

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me all right?

Peter Jackson

Operator

Yes. Yes, we can.

Monique Pollard

Analyst

Great. And couple of questions from me. Firstly, the loss of the Exchange revenues, just wanting to understand what the drop through of those Exchange revenues is to EBITDA, what we should model that as sort of the margin. And then secondly, just wanted to touch briefly on the UK online growth. So when I look at that in the statement, 2019 UK online growth implies the second half UK online revenue is down 2% versus the first half, they were up 1.5%. I know, obviously, the customer due diligence measures have been coming in. But just wanting to understand is that some behind us now? And do you see an acceleration in growth and a return to positive UK online growth for 2020?

Jonathan Hill

Management

If I can deal with the first of those questions. I mean what we’ve said is that the scale of what we have turned off in terms of the small number of partners is up to 1% of revenue. There are significant numbers of mitigating actions that we will look to put in place. So we’re not trying to necessarily guide to that as a loss work. That’s why we didn’t give a range like we did on credit cards, because we think there’s a range of mitigating actions to take place. You should see that coming through in our Q1 trading update in terms of the Exchange. And then we’ll further update you at that point as to the mitigating actions and the outcomes of those as we see that playing out.

Peter Jackson

Operator

And the UK online growth numbers?

David Jennings

Analyst

That’s a good question. I’m just trying to get to the underlying here and look at the…

Peter Jackson

Operator

Do you want to come back to it?

David Jennings

Analyst

We’ll come back to it.

Peter Jackson

Operator

We’ll come back. David will come back.

Monique Pollard

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Peter Jackson

Operator

I think there’s one more question on the phone.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Final question on the telephone comes from the line of Kiranjot Grewal, Bank of America. Please go ahead. You’re live the call.

Kiranjot Grewal

Analyst

Hi. I just had two questions, both on the U.S. Firstly, given the upcoming listing of one of your key competitors in the U.S., there’s increasing focus on vertical integration. Could you maybe comment on where you’re out with that in the U.S.? And how important you – how important it is for you and how you would compare to that business that’s been outlined, the Draftkings business? And then secondly, could you comment on – actually, the app in the U.S., I think originally, there were – you had to download one app per state. Do you think that will be changed to one app per sort of across several states? How long would that take? Thank you.

Matt King

Management

I’ll take the second one first. On the one app, your comment is true for our competitors. We actually always have the view that having one app per state was not the right consumer experience. And so when we launched, we were actually the first in market with an app that works across multiple states. And so you can use the same sports betting app in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Indiana. And we look to continue that strategy because it’s the right customer-first approach. But it’s a demonstration of the type of investment we’re making in technology to differentiate ourselves from the competition, because it’s not an insignificant technical lift. So we’ve always been one app across multiple states. On the vertical integration point, I think the general kind of takeaway I would give you is, I think the Draftkings combination with SBTech is, frankly, an emulation of the strategy that we started 18 months ago. And in terms of why the tie-up between FanDuel as a stand-alone business and Flutter made sense was actually that access to all of the global technology that Flutter had in place. Our view has always been, to really have the best user experience, you need to be using proprietary risk and trading. And you need to be using proprietary technology. Because if you’re simply using that of B2B partners, your product is going to look like the product that everybody else that uses that set of B2B partners. And so I would argue that Draftkings simply came to the same conclusion we did about 12 months later. And so we’ll see.

Kiranjot Grewal

Analyst

So you’d say what they sort of outlined is pretty comparable to what you have? Or do you think you’re think you’re still ahead of the curve, given your launch with Eilers?

Peter Jackson

Operator

I think you have – if you want to get into the details of what Draftkings is doing, I suggest you get into a chat with Draftkings. We’re very pleased with the progress that we’ve made in the U.S. I think Matt has outlined to us the considerable investments we’re making into tech to try and stay ahead of the curve. I think it’s multifaceted. I think you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right product and technology. You’ve got to have the right approach to marketing. You’ve got to have the right engagement with customers. I think actually some of the pricing and risk capabilities are also crucial. We’re very pleased with what we’ve done in the U.S., and I think that’s why we are the number one online sportsbook and the number one online casino business. And I think it’s great. This team has done a great job for us.

Kiranjot Grewal

Analyst

Thank you.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Matthew, in terms of past sales, what would be upside case for ones that we drive forward from that post 2020 group into 2020? And would you be – I can’t think you’d be among the first to launch if they did come earlier than expected?

Matt King

Management

So kind of the second part of your question, we have an explicit kind of guiding principle of trying to always be, if not the first among the first, that launch in any given state. Obviously, it depends on the state in terms of their specific technical requirements and everything else. But certainly, we endeavor to be among the first to launch in every state. I think in terms of what states might come forward on top of the three, I think it’s hard to predict. For context, you’re in the middle of the legislative cycle that the U.S. goes through. You will have certain states that potentially, like they did last year, pass a law in the spring and try to be live for football season. Because in certain states, they view that to be a critical kind of milestone to get live and certainly the tax revenue slowing. And so I think probably the most likely upside, without naming specific states, would be – we have one or more states that pass a law in the next, call it, 60 to 90 days. And the – based at the objective to be live for football season. Probably the best analogy that has happened so far is Indiana, where they passed a law last spring and they were live basically during football season. So that would be the upside case.

Julian Easthope

Analyst

Hi. Thank you very much. It’s Julian Easthope from RBC. Just one question from me. In terms of – it’s a very specific question about the U.S. as it seems to be common today. The other OpEx that you have has moved up from 100 to 150 approximately. And – but within that, you said that you’ve gone from 300 to 1,000 people, which presumably there’s quite a lot of infrastructure that you spent in terms of new states that haven’t opened up yet. So therefore, there’s obviously quite a big cost that’s associated with the things that haven’t opened. I just – I was wondering if you could sort of give an indication as to where, given the states you expect to open, your other OpEx will ultimately level out.

Jonathan Hill

Management

We’ve gone from 700 to 1,000 people. So we have added 300 during the year, which is precisely in line with our expectations. A good chunk of the 300 increment is because we’ve opened in states and we need customer service and folks to interact with our new customers. So actually, you’ll see quite a lot of growth coming through as we scale up state-by-state on the customer operations side, but you shouldn’t expect to see big growth in other areas. The finance team is – finance team and these different departments can scale up. There are certain departments which will scale up. They are not necessarily the – at the higher end of the pay scales in terms of – relative to some of the more highly scaled tech growth, et cetera. So that’s what’s actually happened, that’s exactly in line with what we expected to happen in the year. [Call Ends Abruptly]