Aristocrat Leisure Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aristocrat full year 2025 results briefing webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mr. Trevor Croker, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Aristocrats. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to Aristocrats Financial Results presentation for the full years of 30 September 2025. My name is Trevor Croker, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Aristocrats. Joining me today is Sally Denby, our Chief Financial Officer. Today I'll step through the highlights of the results and provide an update on our strategy. Sally will then discuss our group financial results and balance sheet, after which I'll run through the operational performance and outlook. All figures are in reported currency unless otherwise stated. FY24 was restated to exclude plurium at the last result. Please note the usual disclaimer statement on the back of the deck. Turning now to slide two. Aristocrat delivered on our second half performance commitments and achieved another strong full year result with double digit growth across all key metrics. This illustrates the quality of Aristocrat's portfolio and our ability to continually grow through different environments whilst investing for the future. This was a period of positive change at Aristocrat as the business aligned its enterprise portfolio to refreshed priorities while maintaining an approach that has delivered consistent operational performance and superior profit growth over a sustained period. Along with our strategy, we completed the divestiture of Plarium during the year, generating a significant gain on sale, and subsequent to year end, we divested Big Fish Games. From FY26 onwards, our mobile operations will be focused purely on social casino. Our three complementary business segments are now united by a common core of great gaming slot content and technology, with each offering exciting growth prospects. During the year, the group also invested significantly in technology and product strategies, while taking foundational steps that will set up Aristocrat Interactive to accelerate performance and allow us to fully leverage our content, scale and capabilities over the coming years. Group revenues grew 11% over the period while segment profit grew 12% benefitting from strong organic growth, the inclusion of NeoGames for the full 12 months and FX translation. Aristocrat Gaming delivered strong performance driven by an outstanding second half for outright sales across all market segments with significant share gains in North America and AMZ, where our ship share recovered to over 50%. Gaming Operations delivered install-based growth and continued market share gains, with a sequential improvement in fee per day in the second half. Product Madness delivered impressive performance with continued share gains, profit and margin growth, reflecting focused investment and user acquisition, high-performing content and effective execution of our direct-to-consumer strategy. Interactive benefited from double-digit organic growth in content and iLottery, including from the Neopolar joint venture. Group MPA grew 12% or 9% on a constant currency basis, with EPSA growth even stronger at 15% over the year. Looking forward, we continue to see momentum in our business. We expect to deliver MPA growth over the full year to 30 September 2026 on a constant currency basis. Performance is expected to be phased towards the second half of the year. I'll now turn to our strategy. Slide four recaps our approach to delivering superior long-term sustainable profit growth, which we've shared many times. We start by investing and innovating to create the world's greatest gaming portfolios across key markets at scale. We are committed to high levels of D&D investment to support content development and growth with an increasing focus on returns from high-performing products. This includes investment in outstanding creative talent, and technology to improve both the speed and efficiency with which we can deploy content across multiple priority markets, cabinets and channels. The establishment of Interactive provides scope for our studios to innovate across channels and expand their distribution opportunities. Eriscrep takes a rigorous, proactive approach to growing and defending our intellectual property and ensuring fair competition on a level playing field. The litigation against Light and Wonder continues to progress in both the US and Australia. We are pleased with the US Court's recent decision to extend discovery and require Light and One to provide access to game maps for certain of its hold and spin games. Next, we focus on growing and distributing our leading content, aiming to take share wherever we compete, including in existing and new adjacent markets. Interactive is now a full solution provider for online RNG, with an expanded portfolio across iLottery, content and platforms. We are investing to become a scale global player in this important adjacency and to position the interactive business to accelerate its growth consistent with our stated target of achieving US$1 billion of revenue by FY29. ERISCRAT also invests in differentiating enablers. These include long-term customer partnerships and commercialisation capabilities and a compliance culture that is underpinned by a commitment to a sustainable and vibrant industry. While our priorities and focus areas evolve over time, our fundamental approach to generating growth remains consistent and continues to deliver strong results with considerable opportunities ahead. Over the five-year period since 2020, group revenues and segment profits have grown at a CAGR of 9% and 19% respectively, reflecting share gains and operating leverage across all key segments. MPAT-A has grown at 27% CAGR. This was underpinned by market share gains in gaming operations in store base from 34% to 43% and steady share gains in North American outright sales from 23% to 31%. This strong financial performance has been delivered through diverse conditions, demonstrating the resilience of the group and reflecting the high proportion of recurring revenues that we generate. Consistent delivery has also allowed us to maintain investment and fully fund our organic growth and invest behind inorganic growth priorities while delivering ongoing returns to shareholders. Over the same five-year period, we've returned over $4.3 billion of capital to shareholders through dividends and on market share buybacks. Turning to slide six, we continue to advance our sustainability agenda over the year by driving improvements and further lifting maturity across our most important priorities. This slide shares a few highlights. Empowering Safer Play, or ESP, remains our most important sustainability matter, directly supporting our ability to deliver financial results over the long term to benefit our people, our customers and shareholders. Over the course of the financial year, we made significant progress against our six medium term strategic ESP goals, which were initiated and shared publicly in 2024. Other highlights during the reporting period include comprehensive preparations for the mandatory climate reporting, and the integration of NeoGames operations into our sustainability program with a focus on safer play standards and processes. Upholding high governance standards and strong compliance with gaming and other regulations also remains a fundamental commitment at Aristocrat. Robust and effective gaming regulation is critical to maintaining strong probity and consumer protection standards. This enables the industry to remain vibrant, welcome in the community and able to deliver benefits to all stakeholders over the long term. Full details will be shared in Aristocrat's FY25 Sustainability Disclosures which will be published on the 2nd of December 2025. I'll now hand over to Sally who will take us through a summary of the group's results.

Good morning everyone. I'm starting on slide A, our group results summary. As Trevor mentioned, Aristocrat delivered MPAT-A of $1.6 billion over the year, an increase of 12%. On a fully diluted basis, EPSA increased 15% to 247 cents, reflecting solid operational performance and accretion for our share buyback program. Revenue increased 11% to $6.3 billion and 8% in constant currency. Aristocrat Gaming delivered a strong second half with robust outright sales, units, pricing, and market share increases in both the U.S. and ANZ. Gaming operations recorded solid growth in the install base with sequential improvement in fee per day in the second half of the year in line with our guidance. Revenue growth was further assisted by continued market share gains in social casino, organic growth in interactive, and the inclusion of NeoGames for the full 12-month period. EBDA was 16% higher than the PCP, reflecting margin expansion from favourable mix and improved operating leverage. Benefits from effective cost initiatives taken in FY24 also supported the results. Ongoing cost management continues to provide capacity for strategic reinvestment with well-established discipline across the group. I would like to call out some other items further down the P&L. Firstly, we recorded a $28 million gain on the sale of our Berkshire Integration Centre in the US through corporate costs. Legal costs increased by $33 million compared to FY24, which includes legal costs associated with taking proactive steps to defend aristocrats' intellectual property including $21 million in relation to their ongoing litigation against Light and Wonder. Interest income decreased by $34 million compared to the PCP, primarily due to lower average cash balances following the Neo Games acquisition, and continued share buybacks over the course of the year. Interest expense for the period includes a one-off item of $9 million relating to a tax matter, Excluding this matter, underlying interest expense was in line with the top end of previous guidance of 6% to 7% of US dollar borrowing. The effective tax rate for the year was 28% compared to 27% in the PCP. As we outlined in May, the increase reflects changes in the regional earnings mix and acquisition-related transitional changes, which are expected to moderate over time. Our approach to significant items is consistent with previous years. with M&A-related gains and losses recorded below the MPA line. Finally, the directors have authorised an unfranked final dividend of 49 cents per share for the half-year ended 30 September 2025, representing a payout ratio of 37.4%. The full-year dividend of 93 cents per share represents an increase of 19% over FY24. Slide 9 provides a snapshot of the drivers of MPA growth over the reporting period. Empathia was driven by strong organic growth and share gains in both gaming and product madness, and the addition of NeoGames and Interactive, further supported by favourable FX. This was partially offset by increased investment in D&D and lower interest income. Turning now to cash flows on slide 10. Strong cash flow generation was achieved over the period, reflecting continued operating momentum. CapEx was driven by investment to support continued growth in the North America gaming operations install base, partly offset by the proceeds on the sale of properties previously flagged. Acquisition and advertisements reflected the sale of Plarium, offset by some small strategic technology investments. Aristocrat completed its $1.85 billion on-market share buyback program during the first half of the year and announced a new $750 million program running through to March 2026, of which we have executed $584 million to date. In total, $1.4 billion has been returned to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends over the full year, whilst the business has continued to invest for growth. Aristocrat allocates capital to support our long-term growth strategy and delivers shareholder returns. In particular, the business achieves organic growth through consistent, strong and disciplined D&D, UA and CapEx investments. whilst actively pursuing strategic M&A opportunities in a disciplined and consistent manner. Post-year-end, we completed the acquisition of A-Wager, an exciting adjacent opportunity in line with our growth strategy. Our instructor invested $800 million in D&D during the year to further strengthen our products and technology portfolios and lay the foundations for scaling in online RMG. This represented 12.7% of revenue compared to 13.4% for FY24. Aristocrat manages balance sheets through cycles of investment, and during the first half of the year, we deployed a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Plarium to retire debt. We continue to target a leverage ratio of one to two times net debt to EBITDA over the medium term. However, taking into account the consistent levels of cash generation, our leverage will not fall within this range without material M&A. I would now like to focus on our investments to drive organic growth laid out on slide 12. Total organic investment is generally tracked at around 25% to 27% of group revenues, with the potential to flex this where required in response to business needs and opportunities. High levels of capex in 2024 reflected the exceptional growth of our gaming operations install base, as well as the investment in the commissioning of our Las Vegas integration center in the prior year. This has normalized in the reporting period. U.S. spend increased to support strong business momentum, while also reflecting our continued focus on efficiency and return on marketing spend. Increased D&D largely reflects the inclusion of neogames for the full period. Slide 13 provides a more detailed view of D&D. As part of our wider review of D&D expense, interactive operating costs of around 35 million Australian dollars, previously incorrectly included in D&D, where we classified to segment profit during the period. Adjusting for this, second half 25 D&D would have been 13.2% within our 12.5% to 13.5% guidance range. The net impact of the group P&L from this change was neutral. In Interactive, we continued to invest a significant proportion of revenues in iGaming content, Class 2 mobile, and the New Hampshire Lottery. We maintained D&D investment levels in Product Madness, with a small step up in gaming to support content development. As discussed, for the past two results, a growing proportion of D&D investment relates to enterprise technology managed across the entire portfolio. Additionally, as we have consolidated responsibility for D&D and our group products and technology functions, we are now managing spend at an enterprise level rather than across channels. From the first half of fiscal 26, we will no longer disclose D&D by divisions. Instead, we will be aligning D&D reporting to the way Aristocrat now manages this important investment in two discrete buckets for products and technology. Over the medium term, we continue to expect D&D investment to land within a range of 11% to 12% of revenue as scale benefits are realized. However, our approach to D&D guidance is changing. We will no longer be guiding to D&D as a percentage of revenue, shifting instead to provide a growth expectation. reflecting our evolving business and maturing approach to D&D as we move through investment cycles. We are targeting D&D amidst single-digit growth next year on a constant currency basis. I'll now hand back to Trevor to step through operational performance.