Light & Wonder, Inc.

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to light and wonder first quarter 2026 earnings webcast and conference call at this time all participants are in a listen only mode after the speaker's presentation there will be a question and answer session to ask a question during the session you will need to press star one and one on your telephone you'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised to withdraw your question please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Rowan Gallagher, EVP of Corporate Affairs. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator, and welcome everyone to our first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today in Sydney are Matt Wilson, our President and CEO, and Oliver Chow, our CFO. During today's call, we will discuss our first quarter results and operating performance where we will refer to our earnings presentation. This will then be followed by a question and answer session. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements that may involve certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed during the call. For information regarding these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our earnings materials relating to this call posted in the Investors section of our website and our filings with the SEC and the ASX. We'll also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A description of each non-GAAP measure and a reconciliation of each non-GAAP measure to the most directly comparable GAAP measure can be found in our earnings release and earnings presentation located in the investor section of our website. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Matt to discuss the first quarter results and operational highlights on slide three. Thanks, Matt.

Thanks, Rowan. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining the call today. Light and Wonder has proven to be adaptive and nimble, capitalising on new opportunities through our cross-platform strategies. Importantly, we understand or remain focused on what fundamentally drives value in our business, and that is gain performance. The evidence is clear. We continue to progress and execute at a high level based on internal and industry data we are seeing. Over the past several months, we have faced a number of external headwinds, including tariff pressures and, more recently, geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty affecting end consumers. These are factors largely outside of our control, and we've managed through them with discipline. Despite some softness in the numbers, a more cautious consumer sentiment, uptick in inflation and the tariff impact, we were able to keep our margins steady and still expect a stronger back half performance. To summarise our results for the quarter, consolidated revenue and consolidated EBITDA both grew year over year and margins expanded across every business segment. The combination of top line growth, margin expansion and improving revenue quality is the financial profile we are building towards. Our recurring revenue, which represented 73% of total consolidated revenue, grew 13% year over year, reinforcing the quality of our earnings base. North American installed base, excluding Grover, added over 2,550 premium units year over year, underscoring the continued momentum in gaming operations. Our unwavering commitment to cash enhancement, and value remains with adjusted free cash flow of $207 million in the quarter, up 86% year-over-year, demonstrating the cash-generated power of our business as it scales. EPSA, or adjusted earnings per share, grew 7% to $1.45, reflecting continued cost discipline and the benefit of our ongoing share repurchase program. Across the enterprise, our business continues to benefit from a balanced mix of land and digital-based solutions. reflecting the strength and diversity of Light and Wonder's business model, high margin, cash generative, and omnichannel. Turning to slide four for a high-level view of our consolidated results, you can see a business that is growing and generating more of its revenue from high-quality, flow-through businesses. Gaming and iGaming drove the top-line growth this quarter, underpinned by the strength of our content engine and continued operational momentum. EBITDA margins expanded across every single business segment year over year. This reflects the executional prowess and disciplined focus on efficiency we have embedded across the organisation. Additionally, Grover is also contributing as a high-margin recurring revenue stream within the gaming segment of our portfolio, which will improve over time as we continue to integrate and ramp up the charitable gaming business. The results we delivered reflect an omni-channel business with a strong structural moat. a content and R&D engine that continues to compound, and an increasingly recurring revenue base. Those are the characteristics of a business built for durable long-term growth. Last quarter, we introduced a dashboard to present an annual update on the path towards our long-term targets. We received overwhelmingly positive feedback on our transparency in assessing the health of the business and therefore are providing this assessment you see here on slide five for a quarterly status check on the business. As you can see, green reflects strong execution and performance on track or exceeding what we've guided to. Yellow indicates solid progress but a potential watch point, and red flagging areas where we are being transparent about a gap and have a clear plan to address it. Additionally, we split the metrics up into grey and green highlighted sections, with the grey performance metrics highlighting the building blocks we've directionally guided to for our 2028 goals. The two new green rows introduced here are what we deemed essential to monitor this quarter. North American revenue per day, a metric that is critical in overall game performance and broader macroeconomic environment, continues to trend positively, evidence that the significant investments and commitment we've made in developing our games and franchises are bearing fruit. Candidly, we're also flagging that Syplay and the social casino industry are seeing some softness, and some of the metrics are not where we need them to be. However, we are seeing a modest improvement in our daily active users sequentially, which is a positive sign in the initial stage of stabilisation with players returning to our platform. The team is hopeful that this will trend positively as we continue to invest in this important part of our cross-platform engine. Overall, most of this scorecard shows positive results. We recognise that there is still room for improvement across the organisation and our teams are working collectively to address them diligently and effectively with well-defined plans. This is the kind of business we are building, one that executes with discipline, communicates with clarity, and stays focused on the long-term targets we have set. I will now go into the highlights and details of each of the businesses for the quarter. Turning to gaming on slide seven. The results reflect the quality and diversity of what we've built with our R&D engines. Revenue grew 3% to $512 million, and EBITDA increased 7% to $271 million year-over-year, with margins up 200 basis points to 53%. The margin expansion also reflects a richer revenue mix towards recurring revenue units in the absence of Grover in the prior period. Gaming operations grew 38% year-over-year, driven by continued premium install-based expansion on improved game performance within the portfolio, as we continue to see strong coin intrends 43 million of contribution from Grover. Tables grew 24% with strong utility sales in North America and solid product sales across EMEA and Asia. I'm pleased with the progress we've made here with our revamped product roadmap and commercial strategy. We are well positioned to capture the global opportunities that will be available to us in this space. Gaming machine sales were down 25% and gaming systems declined 14%. These are largely timing and not demand driven with the seasonal sequential volume reset. that follows a strong fourth quarter, underscoring the quality and durability of this business. Our pipeline is healthy, and we expect both to normalize as we move through the year into the second half when we ramp up the product launches. Pleasingly, we secured a number of systems contract wins recently, both in competitive replacements and long-term renewals across tribal, commercial, and state-regulated gaming operators, a true testament to our expanded suite of capabilities and offerings driving the systems business. Let's now turn to KPIs on slide eight. Gaming continues to build on a strong recurring revenue foundation with our North American install base up 41% year over year to 48,600 units at quarter end. This also reflects 12,200 Grover units added to the footprint. Importantly, premium units have increased for 23 consecutive quarters and is now 56% of the total North American install base with over 2,550 net ads year over year. It's worth noting that an operator-specific VLT to Class III conversion affected our non-premium unit count this quarter. Adjusting for that conversion, our premium install base grew in excess of the 500-unit quarterly growth we had previously guarded. Our blended average daily revenue per unit in North America grew 3% to over $48, inclusive of over units driven by strong wide-area progressive performance and coin-in against a backdrop of continued strength in industry-wide gross gain in revenues. Excluding Grover, North American store-based revenue per day was up 8% year over year, a meaningful indicator of the underlying business momentum. This is further reflected in our presence across multiple categories on the ILS WAP and premium lease charts, with franchises such as Ultimate Firelink, Huff & Puff, Dancing Drums, among others continuing to perform well. Globally, we shipped 7,200 of game sales units in the quarter. We continue to see strong momentum from non-adjacency replacements in North America. with solid performance from our piggy banking break-in and super hot flaming pot franchises. International sales were lower year over year due to the timing of shipments and hardware cycle in Australia, as well as new and expansion units in the Philippines in the prior year. Our international pipeline remains robust and we expect growth in this segment as orders are fulfilled later in the year with the launch of the Cosmic Dual Screen Cabinet in late Q2 and the regionalised roadmaps tailored for each of these regions. Average selling price held essentially flat at approximately $19,700, reflecting the pricing discipline and premium positioning of our portfolio. Looking ahead, we believe the setup for the second half unit sales is compelling. A strong content calendar, hardware refreshes that the market has been anticipating, and a global pipeline, we have high confidence in converting. Moving on to slide nine for an update on Grover. What you see here is an acquisition that is performing and benefiting from the established infrastructure we have here at Light and Wonder. Grover delivered $43 million in revenue for the quarter, driven by strong performance across existing markets and our entry into Indiana. We ended the quarter with over 12,200 units installed, up 660 units sequentially. We have added over 1,200 units to the Grover install base since we closed the deal in the second quarter last year. That growth rate directly reflects demand for this product and the strength of Grover's local market relationships with the charities and end customers. Indiana is exciting and a market that's still in its early innings. Encouragingly, we saw unit economic scale and improve progressively throughout the quarter, similar to our prior experience entering new markets. Our strategy here is clear. We adopt an effective and prudent commercial approach by pricing our business reflective of our game content and customer service value points of differentiation. Historically, that has served us well, as we've progressively grown the market and share over time across established markets. From an integration standpoint, we remain focused on deepening the alignment of L&W content, hardware, and brands within Grover. Our first light and wonder title, Eureka Treasure Train, was launched in Indiana, with exceptional early results supported by strong player engagement across all denomination play, reflecting the broad appeal across our player base. We expect to bring a steady flow of light and wonder hardware and content to the market throughout the remainder of 2026. Content integration is at the core of our value creation thesis for this acquisition, bringing our world-class game development capability to a recurring revenue platform with exceptional unit economics. Looking at the map on this slide, you can see the growth opportunity in front of us. Minnesota and Maryland remain priorities, and we are actively engaged in both. New Mexico is also a market that we are assessing while Alaska presents as an attractive opportunity pending legislation. The combination of Light and Wonder's content strength and Grover's operational reach creates a compelling growth platform, one that evolves our charitable gaming businesses into a single, unified content and hardware ecosystem with significant potential across both current and future markets. Turning to SidePlay on slide 10, we continue to see the social casino market under pressure in the quarter, with preliminary industry estimates indicating a mid-single-digit year-over-year decline as reflected in Sideplay's lower revenue. Despite the softness, we delivered growth in the direct-to-consumer platform, posting a record $50 million and a 27% of Sideplay's revenue, up from 13% in the first quarter of last year. The diversity of our portfolio was also evident across several titles. Quick Hit and 88 Fortunes both grew year-over-year, and Monopoly achieved its sixth consecutive quarter of revenue growth. The sustained performance of these franchises reflects the quality of our LiveOps engine and the depth of our meta capabilities across Sideplay. As for Jackpot Party, we are seeing the engagement improvements that we've been working towards. Play rates are tracking above the prior year, and importantly, our daily active users have stabilised and grew modestly quarter over quarter. The trajectory is moving in the right direction, giving us the confidence to lean back into UA investments as we move through the year. Engagement and monetization across the portfolio remain key focuses. We saw sequential growth in monthly paying users, driven by the new game economies we have deployed and targeted marketing investment. An average monthly revenue per paying user grew 8% year over year to $126. Going forward, we remain committed to the initiatives that will return SidePlay to revenue growth, including launching new game features such as SideBets and MetaQuest, which are expected to further improve our monetization flywheel. Now onto slide 11, where we delivered another strong quarter of revenue in Aibada growth in iGaming, extending double-digit momentum across the segment. Revenue grew 18% year-over-year to $91 million, and Aibada grew 22% to $33 million. with margins expanding year-over-year to 36%. These results were driven by the proliferation of first-party content across our platform and the ongoing expansion of our partner network. Wages processed on our content aggregation platform, OGS, grew 19% year-over-year to a record $29.9 billion. This quarter also marked the fifth sequential period of global first-party content GGR growth on OGS. First-party growth was led by the Huff & Puff and Pirate series, with Huff and lots of Puff ranking first and Pirates 4 ranking second globally. Additionally, eight of the top 10 games across our network in the quarter were first-party titles, reflecting the durability of our franchise strategy and the strength of our omni-channel approach to content deployment. Third-party content growth was driven by Canada expansion, new market entries, and continued momentum in Europe. The reliability and scale of our platform remains central to that growth. enabling us to connect an expanding network of studios to operators across the markets. You can see on slide 12 that iGaming presents a compelling story with key growth opportunities as jurisdictions open up. The upcoming Alberta commercial launch represents a key expansion milestone, and Elk Studios is on track to receive licensing in Pennsylvania with launch expected in the back half of the year. We're also encouraged by Elk's strong early performance in South Africa, which reinforces our confidence in the new market entries. New market development remains a strategic priority, with continued focus on South Africa, Brazil, and the Philippines as we solidify our footing in the regions. On the content side, first-party momentum continues to build. The success of our Huff & Puff and Pirates franchises provides a strong foundation. and we have a robust slate of franchise extensions and new games including titles from our Wizard of Oz, Wonka and Big Hot Flaming Pops series slated for launch this quarter. The roadmap you've seen here reflects the breadth of the content pipeline across both our North American and European markets. Looking ahead, I'd like to note the recently enacted UK tax change will begin to pressure our growth trajectory starting in the second quarter and is expected to continue through the end of the year. We are actively managing through this with operators and we believe new market opportunities will offset that pressure over time. Overall, we remain confident in our iGaming roadmap and the long-term growth potential this segment represents for the business. Before I hand to Oliver, I'd like to turn your attention to some of the slides we provided in the appendix. The gaming industry continues to demonstrate resilience, growing at mid-single-digit CAGR over the past two decades, despite macro events. We continue to see strong GGR this quarter amid geopolitical uncertainty, and we are well positioned to capitalize on opportunities with a robust global roadmap. Additionally, the progression of our financial profile reflects the kind of recurring revenue business earnings base we are intentionally building, which is further accentuated through our buybacks, delivering significant value to shareholders. Importantly, we are staying ahead of the trends. working through our AI enablement program across technology, content and business operations. Our IP, data, regulatory approvals, customer relationships and proprietary platforms gives us a structural note that I believe is genuinely difficult to replicate. We'll share more about the AI enablement programs around second quarter earnings in conjunction with AGE as we complete the foundational work. With that, I'll turn it over to Oliver to go through the financial highlights for the quarter. Oliver.