Flutter, the parent company of sports betting and gaming giant FanDuel, began trading on the NYSE on Monday, Jan. 29, under the ticker FLUT. The move hopes to help the company that owns Betfair, in addition to FanDuel, further beef up its current market standing in the United States.
This is a secondary listing for the company, which will retain its primary listing on the London Stock Exchange for the time being.
The move to the NYSE could be successfully executed as soon as this year if greenlit by shareholders, and CEO Peter Jackson is thrilled by the potential that comes with such a change.
“We’ve been really excited to come and list our business here on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s the world’s biggest capital market. We’re the world’s biggest sports betting and gaming business,” Jackson stated in an interview with Yahoo Finance also adding: “We’re in 45% of the population here in the US already,” with this move potentially helping them further blanket the sports betting market in the United States.
Along with strengthing its stature in the US, Flutter being housed on the NYSE also boosts the accessibility of a booming sports betting and gaming company for American investors, something its board of directors acknowledges.
“With our NYSE listing effective today, this is a pivotal moment for the Group as we make Flutter more accessible to U.S.-based investors and gain access to deeper capital markets. We believe a U.S. primary listing is the natural home for Flutter given FanDuel’s #1 position in the U.S., a market to which we expect to contribute the largest proportion of profits in the near future.”
FanDuel is currently the United States’ market share leader in sports betting and gaming with considerable room for growth.
Sports betting is currently legal in 38 of 50 US states, but sports betting is not legally permitted in some of the most populous ones such as Texas and California. Despite this, the online sports betting and gaming market is projected to surpass $40 billion by 2030, and 80% of the population is expected to have access to sports betting. FanDuel hopes to be the centerpiece in reaching and or surpassing those market projections.
While FanDuel remains well positioned both in terms of popularity and profitability, DraftKings, FanDuel’s biggest adversary in the sports betting market, has also assumed the role of one of the pioneers of this space with shares skyrocketing more than 150% over the last year, including a 9% uptick year-to-date.
Looking at things through a lens of net revenue, FanDuel occupied an impressive 51% of the market share in Q4 of 2023. However, when examining things by gross revenue, FanDuel is still eying how to improve its market share, which was 43% in the fourth quarter of 2023. DraftKings is also aiming to perch themselves higher on the gross revenue mountaintop, and those efforts are aided by their footing in the state of New York, which is the biggest sports betting state in the US.
Despite all of this, FanDuel continues to outpace DraftKings in posting profits, an encouraging sign for Flutter as they pivot even further into the US sports betting and gaming market.
Aside from DraftKings, other competitors such as BetMGM, Ceasars Sportsbook, ESPN BET, and the newly launched Fanatics Sportsbook, have fetched profits in certain quarters, but profitability hasn’t been sustained and they haven’t been able to claim a significant share of the market. They will continue to try to snatch shares from FanDuel and DraftKings, but it remains to be seen what the results of those efforts will be.
