This was made more apparent in a letter to shareholders signed off by Peter Jackson, the NYSE gambling group’s CEO, which focused heavily on US developments and the upgrades being made to the FanDuel sportsbook for the first 10 or so paragraphs.
“Our proprietary pricing capability, and always-on approach to innovation driven by the Flutter Edge, enables delivery of our market-leading sportsbook product for our US customers,” he said.
“We believe the richness of the FanDuel product offering is unmatched and this product advantage continues to drive our expected structural hold progression, reaching 14.1% in the quarter.”
This does not mean that the company has forgotten its UK&I roots, however, originating in the Republic of Ireland when the Paddy Power sportsbook brand was founded back in 1988 as a retail business before making the jump to online in the 2000s.
While the US may now be the location of Flutter’s primary listing, dealing a moral blow to the LSE in the process, the company still has designs on the UK&I region, Jackson told stakeholders.
Flutter’s UK&I performance saw marginal year-over-year revenue growth of 2% to $882m (Q1 2024: $861m) attributed to ‘very operator friendly results’ during Q1 2024. Although the firm also recorded lower sportsbook handle due to softer horse racing betting volumes outside major events like Cheltenham, UK and Irish structural gross revenue margin continues to expand for the firm, Jackson said.
“This is driven by ongoing investment in our sportsbook product, including Super Sub, to offer even more markets, helping drive increased parlay penetration,” the CEO explained.
“The migration of our Sky Bet customers to our in-house platform is progressing well with over 25% of customers (over two million accounts) already migrated, with expected completion in Q2.
“The new platform will enable Sky Bet to fully access the benefits of the Flutter Edge and provide customers with an even better user experience.”
Flutter chasing a Brazil podium spot?
For the past couple of years, Flutter has been pursuing an extensive strategy of expansion via M&A. This has seen the firm look to acquire what it likes to call ‘gold medal’ brands to secure podium spots in major markets – Italy’s Snaitech being a notable recent example.
Unsurprisingly, Brazil – Latin America’s largest freshly launched and already highly lucrative betting market – is on Flutter’s agenda. Jackson asserted that: “M&A in Brazil remains on track as we augment an impressive portfolio of local hero brands.”
Central to Flutter’s local hero approach in Brazil is NSX, operator of the prominent Betnacional brand, which the group expects to acquire this month, according to Jackson. This will form the basis of its Flutter Brazil business, building on its existing presence in the market via Betfair.
“Betnacional brings a strong local management team, localized proprietary technology and a local hero brand which, alongside our existing Betfair Brazil business and Flutter Edge capabilities, will position us for success in this very exciting market,” Jackson said.
Turning back to Flutter’s founding continent of Europe, Jackson also provided an update on its growth in the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) region where it is active in markets like Georgia and Armenia via Adjarabet and Serbia via MaxBet.
Over in Australia, where the firm is active via the Sportsbet brand, a similar approach is being adopted to Flutter’s legacy markets of the UK. Similar to the UK, however, Australia is undergoing regulatory reviews, which although shelved by PM Anthony Albanese’ government prior to this year’s election may now be back on the table.
“Within APAC sports, in Australia, we continue to face the racing industry’s structural challenges,” Jackson said. “We have been able to partly offset our adverse racing handle trends by expanding our sports structural gross win margin through ongoing product-led improvements such as “The Feed” feature, which helped drive parlay penetration, alongside improved customer generosity sophistication.”
Overall, though, the US remains Flutter’s focal market – and as stated above, for good reason. This quarter the firm reported group-wide revenue of $3.66bn, of which $1.67bn was generated by FanDuel’s US market leadership.
This will undoubtedly continue to be the case, but it has not meant that Flutter has lost sight of its international vision – the UK, Ireland, CEE region, Brazil, Australia, India and more all fall within its growth ambitions, and the group looks set to dominate global gaming for the foreseeable future.
Dingnews.com 09/05/2025