Aristocrat Leisure Aktie

Good morning, and welcome to Aristocrat's 2026 Investor Briefing. We appreciate your participation today. My name is James Coghill, General Manager of Investor Relations.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which many of our participants in Australia are joining from today. I'd remind everyone that this webcast is being recorded and will be uploaded to the Aristocrat website after the event.

I'd also like to draw your attention to the disclaimer statement included in today's presentation materials. Today's discussion will lead forward-looking statements, and we encourage everyone to review the disclosures.

Let me briefly walk through the agenda for today. Trevor Croker will begin with an overview of group strategy shortly. Various executives will then present on their respective areas with Trevor presenting on gaming, as you can see on the agenda, as our gaming CEO, Craig Turner, is away on annual leave. We'll then take a short minute break for 10 minutes and restart with Dylan Slaney, who will provide an in-depth review of our progress at Interactive -- we'll then go back to Sydney and here from Sally Denby, our CFO, before we conclude with Q&A.

You can submit questions throughout today's session. just select the messaging icon type your question in the box towards the top of the page and press the send button.

Before we get started, I want to highlight the key messages that we'd like you to take away from today's investor briefing. The session will have a deliberate strategic focus and show how the group is tightly aligned around the strategy striving to achieve superior returns for shareholders over the long term. Trevor's session will focus on the 5 strategic advantages that continue to set us apart. And you'll hear how AI is strengthening these differentiators. Aristocrat continues to win share in the most attractive and fastest-growing parts of our market, and we'll demonstrate why we believe this will continue into the future. Dylan has been leading interactive for almost 8 months now and has a great story to share. Interactive has a refreshed strategy fully aligned with the group and has a clear path to meaningful value creation. And finally, disciplined capital allocation and sharper operating leverage will remain central to our strategic delivery.

And with that, I'll hand over to Trevor.

Thanks, James, and good morning, everyone. Before I go to group strategy, let me touch on our outlook for FY '26. Since we last spoke to you in May, we continue to meet our expectations and remain confident in our outlook. I want to reiterate our overarching group NPATA growth and divisional outlook statements for FY '26 and modeling inputs that were provided at the time of our half year result presentation. Turning now to our group strategy. We're speaking to you today at a really important juncture in Aristocrat's journey. Over the past decade, we've transformed Aristo credit to a scaled, global content and technology business with diversified growth engines, leading market positions and a highly resilient operating model.

Today, we'll share with how we intend to build on that foundation, accelerate the next phase of growth. We'll highlight the scale positions and significant growth opportunities across the group with a proven long-term growth strategy that is focused on driving sustainable shareholder returns into the future and spend some time talking about the significant strategic advantages that underpin our success and strong financial track record.

So let's get started. At Aristocrat, our mission is simple, bringing joy to life through the power of play. This mission is embedded in everything that we do and in every decision we make. Aristocrat is a content and technology company at heart, creating great games to delight players wherever and whenever they play. We have 3 scaled and copulatory verticals with leading market positions, large and growing markets and global reach. These businesses reinforce and complement 1 another through shared content, technology, analytics and distribution capabilities, while providing diversification across channels, markets, audiences and regulatory structures. It's a powerful combination with significant opportunity for growth.

Our business today is the culmination of a long journey, which has seen an acceleration in transformation over the past decade. That transformation has been driven by a combination of discipline, organic investment and strategic approach to M&A. Not only have we focused on acquiring capabilities, distribution and talent to extend our content and IP footprint, we've also responded to changing market conditions and evolving priorities, refocusing the portfolio as appropriate. Product Madness is an excellent example of this strategy in action. Today, Product Madness is a focused social slot provider following the divestitures of Plarium and Big Fish, which generated double-digit returns for us and is no longer a good strategic fit.

Meanwhile, recent acquisitions like a wager and Gaming analytics add new distribution channels and capabilities while the exit from White Label further demonstrates our focus. And since acquiring product managers in 2012, Aristocrat's scale has increased substantially, growing revenue at 17% CAGR and increasing by almost 8x, while EBITDA has grown at 24% CAGR, generating attractive shareholder returns. This reflects the strong growth across all 3 businesses with the group now generating over 70% recurring revenue and strong cash flow conversion for investment in growth and return to shareholders. Aristocrat has a proven execution track record, which has been driven by our long-term growth strategy. This strategy remains focused on delivering sustainable growth and superior shareholder returns into the future.

At the heart of this strategy is our passionate approach to content. Aristocrat's content is widely recognized as the industry's best. Investing in D&D support innovation maintaining this leadership position and protecting our IP remains our most important priority. Our global studio model takes an enterprise-wide approach to game development and accelerating distribution across channels and markets. This includes a focus on expanding in underpenetrated markets with a particular focus on North American adjacencies and EMEA.

Our platform strategy represents a critical enabler of future growth, presenting new distribution opportunities as well as integrating advanced analytics, mobile connectivity and real-time player engagement capabilities. As we grow, we expect to benefit from our Winriscrat operating model which drives greater alignment, scalability and decision-making effectiveness across the group. We've also outlined 4 key performance aspirations that you'll hear us reference throughout the day. First, our relentless ambition to take market share, although we have well-established market positions, we go to market every day to win share. The most important market share opportunity ahead of us today is iGaming and will outline its significance for our interactive USD 1 billion revenue target later today.

Delivering operating leverage and consistently improving EBITDA margins are also a critical outputs for our strategy. Executing against that strategy requires strong leadership capability. We are clear about the choices we're making to align our resources behind our strategy and to ensure we are well placed to capture our biggest opportunities. Over the past 12 months, we chose to increase leadership skills deepen our talent pool and grow enterprise capability in priority areas. Notably, over the recent months, we've implemented a significant refresh to our executive leadership team through a mix of outstanding external hires and internal development.

Earlier this year, we announced the appointment of Bob Serr as Chief Technology Officer; and Dafne Guisard, Chief Commercial Officer for EMEA. Dafne is also taking over accountability for the Product Madness business from Chief Strategy Officer, Superna Kalle. These appointments build on the recent recruitment of Dylan Slaney as CEO of Interactive and Barry French's Chief Corporate Affairs and Marketing Officer. These new leaders complement the skills and experience of the existing leadership, ensuring our capability experience enables the delivery of our long-term strategy to build a high-performing culture.

We are clearly benefiting from growing in-house expertise in areas highly relevant to our strategy, including AI, emerging technologies, digital and consumer skill sets, specialist iGaming and marketing capability. We are amplifying this through genuine enterprise thinking. For example, the creation of single marketing function, holistic oversight of the EMEA region and a total business approach to critical customer relationships in our largest market in North America. More broadly, we continue to invest heavily in attracting and developing world-class talent across product, technology and commercial leadership.

Our comfort is in Aristocrat's sustained growth and strategic execution stems from a set of unique differentiators that form a powerful ecosystem providing resilience across business cycles. This has enabled the group to navigate challenges from cover to geopolitical volatility while continuing to outperform. Looking ahead, AI deployment represents a significant opportunity to further strengthen each of these differentiators. I'll briefly step through each of these.

First, our content. Aristocrat's market-leading portfolio of content brands of proprietary IP is the foundation of our success. Our portfolio includes some of the most successful and beloved brands and proven game mechanics in the industry and a diversified portfolio of leading cabinets that appeal to customers and players alike. This deep library has been built through its decades of sustained investment in design and development, driving market share gains.

This slide shows some of our top-performing franchises and extraordinary longevity and superior performance of these brand families. These brands have been consistently featured on industry leader boards for many years. We have carefully nurtured and extended these game families throughout the years from Class III to Class II from SSP to MSP to adjacent markets and across channels. At the same time, we've clearly -- we've created new brands like SpookyLink and [indiscernible] that continue to refresh the portfolio with innovative ideas and new game features and segments. And there is more to come. We continue to launch our proven land-based and social titles in iGaming and iLottery. We regularly defend our IP portfolio to protect the value of our creative and technical innovation further demonstrating our commitment to our creative and technical teams.

The source for our leading content IP and brands is a globally integrated network of world-class creative studios and talent that is increasingly developing games with 3 verticals in mind. Our commitment to consistently invest in D&D provides confidence in our pipeline with annual game innovations, new brands, new licenses, cabinets and improving technology to deliver superior and predictable performance to our customers. This creative ecosystem is further supported by advanced tools and technology, which increasingly utilize AI. This enables our studios to deliver high-performing content efficiently and at scale.

Organizational alignment across product and technologies improve cross-channel leverage, enhancing speed to market. Each studio enjoys autonomy and creative freedom while also benefiting from customer insights and collaboration across the group. Aristocrat has evolved to maximize player reach across channels and ultimately optimize returns. Multichannel distribution represents a critical advantage, which many of our digital competitors don't have. Our multichannel operating model starts with a deep understanding of the player, combined with an understanding of our customers' needs. We use this knowledge to evaluate game concepts and assess franchise potential early to focus on opportunities with the biggest scalability and return. With a meticulous plan to develop and sequence games across channels, determining the optimal launch channel and expansion pathway.

And finally, we execute launching games into the appropriate channel at the appropriate time, capturing learnings each step of the way and iterating to improve. The result is stronger franchise, longer-term scalability, faster speed to market and higher player lifetime value.

Aristocrat's regulatory expertise also represents a critical advantage. We operate in highly regulated markets, maintaining over 750 company licensed globally, a substantial pillar of the Eco system, representing a significant investment in both dollars and time. Further, our proven compliance capabilities, governance standards and most of all trust of regulators, customers and players built up over decades is a meaningful differentiator to reinforce the group's social license to operate. These capabilities you see on the slide cannot easily or quickly be replicated nor displaced by AI.

Our customer relationships are another important strategic advantage. We will build long-standing partnerships with a diversified base of customer, including commercial operators, tribal operators, governance and more recently with digital native operators. These relationships are anchored in our content leadership and amplified by our scale commercialization and sales capabilities, global distribution and an extensive service infrastructure. We see opportunities to continue to deepen these relationships through harnessing our data insights and intelligence capabilities. A deep commitment to sustainability underpins our strategic priorities and informs how we operate as a company. Our strong focus on governance, empowering safer play or ESP and community impact enhances our resilience and reputation and underpins our social license to operate.

ESP remains our most important sustainability matter directly supporting our ability to deliver financial results over the long term to benefit our people, customers and our shareholders. We strive to take an ESP leadership role and uphold high standards of responsible business practices. We continue to invest in ESP, collaborating with our customers, regulators, industry partners and those who share our vision for a vibrant and sustainable industry. Implementation of our long-term growth strategy has led to a consistent and enviable track record with strong performance across all operating metrics and financial aspirations. Growth has been delivered across a range of operating environments despite various macro challenges.

We believe this reflects the strength and the resilience of our operating model, the durability of our strategic advantages and consistent execution by our dedicated teams.

In summary, Aristocrat has transformed and focused its business around 3 scaled and complementary segments, each with significant growth opportunities. We have a strong track record that has been underpinned by a set of unique strategic advantages. We've delivered consistently through executing against a proven long-term growth strategy, anchoring contact leadership and efficient operational scale, which is enhanced by AI.

So in closing, our priorities made clear, and our teams are aligned and energized. We believe Aristocrat is exceptionally well positioned to continue to generate sustainable superior total shareholder returns into the future.

With that, I'll now hand over to Superna.

Thanks, Trevor. Good morning, everyone. I'm Suparna Kalle, Chief Strategy Officer at Aristocrat. I'm responsible for driving our group growth strategy, along with leveraging Aristocrat's industry-leading intellectual property across our top North American customers. Before joining Aristocrat, I held senior leadership positions at both Sony Fisher's Entertainment and Lionsgate, where I built and managed global businesses, including streaming channels and platforms. I'm looking forward to sharing my perspectives on the significant opportunities we have in front of us to expand our markets, our products and deepen customer relationships.

Today, I'll be providing a good perspective on how we are leveraging our strengths as we continue to grow and scale. I will focus on the large and resilient markets that Aristocrat operates in and why we see substantial runway to continue to gain share through winning where we already compete and by extending into new adjacencies, verticals and geographies. we see significant opportunity to leverage our unique portfolio across channels and in so doing better serve our customers. Taken together, these pillars provide a clear disciplined framework for how we grow. Our largest business is land-based gaming, Aristocrat's heritage, where we focus exclusively on the EGM segment -- within this, North America accounts for more than half of the market and represents a strong beachhead for Aristocrat Gaming with leading positions across gaming operations and outright sales.

The next largest market is Europe, where we have the opportunity to utilize our IP to scale the business. In ANZ in Asia, we have a strong position, compelling products and see even more growth ahead. Land-based gaming is projected to continue to grow at low single digits through 2030 across geographies. Looking forward, we don't feel constrained by the lower growth rates in these relatively mature markets. We have proven that we will take share and grow revenues ahead of the market. North America has been an excellent example of this in recent years. While the market may have grown at low single digits, Aristocrat has driven the category growth. We've significantly outpaced the market in both gaming operations and outright sales growing at 9% and 10%, respectively, since 2019.

As Trevor will discuss shortly, we expect superior performance of our games to continue to drive share as customers optimize their AGM footprint, and we focus on areas where we are underpenetrated. In gaming operations, this includes destination markets like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where our unit share is underpenetrated relative to our performance share. In outright sales, we see upside in adjacent markets and newer geographies. As we are recent entrants, we have opportunity to increase our penetration as well as participate in new openings and expansions.

We also see additional growth in new gaming markets such as the UAE. Turning to Social Casino, where Aristocrat focuses exclusively on social slots, a $4 billion market, of which approximately 70% comes from North America. The segment is relatively mature with a well-established competitor set in no recent notable new entrants. Scaled operators such as Aristocrat benefit from established land-based brands, a loyal player base sophisticated retention frameworks and disciplined UA capabilities. In recent years, gray market sweepstakes operators have expanded revenue, negatively impacting the market. However, 20 states in the U.S. have issued seasoned assist orders or announced outright bans on sweepstakes operators with more likely to follow.

Finally, the migration to direct-to-consumer platforms has been a margin tailwind for the industry and for Aristocrat Product Madness. Following significant growth in the COVID years, the social slots category slowed and in the near term is expected to continue to contract marginally. Despite these broader market issues, Product Madness has continued to grow and take share. By creating engaging player experiences, increasing personalization and further capitalizing on competitor disruption, we're confident this can continue. We also see opportunities to expand in adjacent markets in select geographies within EMEA where our exposure is limited.

Our growth strategy will continue to leverage AI and data insights as we have done so effectively during the past few years. And underpinning the strategy are the ongoing deliberate UA investment choices to bring in new players, retain loyal cohorts and drive profitability. Dafne will certainly elaborate on this later today.

Turning to Interactive. The online RMG market is an exciting opportunity for us, and we're looking forward to Dylan's deep dive later today. The market GGR is substantial, well developed in certain geographies and at nation stages and others. We're focused on 2 key growth engines. In iGaming, we're at the early stage of utilizing our strength of the Aristocrat group, whereas our iLottery business as a leader in North America. Unlike our other businesses, North America is a relatively small contributor to the overall online RMG market today. However, this is changing quickly. We are well positioned to capitalize on this given our land-based strengths in slots content, while also expanding our international penetration in targeted markets.

Online RMG is the fastest-growing market that we participate in today with both the iGaming and iLottery markets expected to grow double digits through 2030. While we are significantly underpenetrated in our content market share today, we expect a consistent rollout of leading Aristocrat land-based titles online to drive meaningful share gains. Within iLottery, we are well positioned to compete for upcoming renewals and new business opportunities with several states currently discussing legalization. We see further opportunity to expand and differentiate our iLottery portfolio by leveraging our leading Aristocrat brands a future opportunity. Combined with our technology platform capabilities, we see considerable potential to optimize customer returns and player experiences.

Okay. Moving on to our cross-channel strategy and how we optimize our position across 3 verticals. So just as we leveraged our leading land-based brands to become #1 in social slots, we continue to believe that cross-channel player affinity for our land-based slots games will fuel our growth in online RMG. Recently, our consumer insights team conducted a study of 5,700 U.S. slots players in regulated online states. The results showed a significant conversion of players across segments with online players having an affinity for land-based titles, which they increasingly expect to find online. These findings give us confidence that our cross-channel strategy resonates with players and ultimately, in our ability to gain share and interactive as we launch leading land-based titles like Lightning Link high stake slots, the strong pipeline of other top-performing Aristocrat games and franchises expected to launch in due course.

Let's take a look at how we scale our content. So we've worked really hard to craft a streamlined, focused slots content operating model that drives our leading brands across multiple and expanding channels. Furthermore, the alignment of our product and tech teams have evolved the way we develop and distribute that content with games now designed with multichannel distribution in mind from the start. Digital channels provide platforms to expand the reach of proven land-based franchises and to iterate it speed. This keeps games fresh and enables us to efficiently test and/or find the portfolio. Collectively, this cross-channel approach increases customer touch points and ultimately extends the player life cycle.

Our digital first content enables us to reach new demographics in markets with tailored products, further extending our reach in new geographies and channels. While we see strong expansion options across our core markets, we also see potential to offer new products and services to our existing customers. During the past year, we've executed a deliberate M&A strategy to expand our position from a leading content provider to a broader data and platform-driven partner for casino operators. The acquisitions highlighted on this slide span cardless loyalty through MTS, cashless wallet through bit boss and advanced analytics through gaming analytics.

We've also acquired an additional channel for live EGM contents driven through Awager. These acquisitions are being integrated to enable real-time engagement with players across land-based and online channels, while providing operators with a more unified and actionable view of their businesses using the power of AI to help customers drive value. This positions us at the center of the industry shift toward AI-driven operations and, more importantly, expands our total addressable market beyond content into high-value services and scalable revenue opportunities. We are effectively leveraging our own internal AI expertise on behalf of our customers, helping operators optimize capital allocation, increase player engagement and loyalty and ultimately drive higher profitability. In doing so, we enable the casino of the near future.

As you will hear throughout today, we believe we are ideally positioned to grow our business into the future. We continue to take share in both current markets and through entering new verticals and adjacencies that define the market -- and define the markets that we operate in. We are doing this by capitalizing on our leading brands and technology to accelerate distribution across channels and delighting players. We support our long-term customer partnerships to drive growth and further success and when our customers win, we win.

I'll now turn it over to Bob to discuss our AI strategy.

Thanks, Superna, and good morning, everyone. I am Bob Serr, and I recently joined the team as Aristocrat's Chief Technology Officer. Prior to joining Aristocrat, I held senior technology roles, most recently at Microsoft, Amazon and IGT. My experiences have given me deep expertise in AI and global cloud platforms, capabilities that I look forward to further embedding at Aristocrat.

Today, I'd like to share how Aristocrat is approaching AI, what we've achieved so far and most importantly, why we believe AI can strengthen the strategic advantages that already differentiate our business. I will also go through a few case studies on how we're enhancing creativity, improving velocity to market and advancing our AI-powered insights. Simply put, AI is not our strategy. It's an accelerator of our strategy. by applying AI to the unique assets that already make Aristocrat successful, our content, brands, talent, proprietary data and customer relationships, we believe we can continue to grow market share and revenues improving operating leverage and deliver sustainable shareholder value. Like many companies, our AI journey began with experimentation.

Following the public release of Chat GPT in late 2022, we started exploring our generative AI, how GI could best be used to create value across the enterprise. From the beginning, our focus was disciplined adoption, combined with appropriate risk management. To this end, in 2023, we established an enterprise AI steering committee and introduced formal governance, policies and accountability structures across Aristocrat. This allowed us to embrace AI with an appropriate governance structure to protect our valuable IP and safeguard the privacy of our players, our customers and our players. During 2024, we expanded the use of AI tools across the enterprise. Beginning with our software development teams, we adopted technologies such as Google Gemini, GitHub and CoPilot and establish a number of programs focused on improved productivity and accelerated development.

By 2025, we began moving past simple deployment of tools to fully embracing AI. Processes were challenged and reengineered with autonomous agent-based workflows executing increasingly sophisticated tasks achieving significant and measurable productivity gains and allowing our talent to focus on higher value areas. Today, we're entering the next phase of AI development. AI deployments. As we move forward, we expect to leverage agenetic AI to redesign increasingly complex workflows at scale, enabling productivity and efficiency gains across the enterprise. This includes faster and higher quality product and content development, overall enabling teams to deliver significantly greater contributions within their roles. While there is much to do, we've made steady and meaningful AI progress. In a recent industry survey by UNLV International Gaming Institute. Aristocrat's overall AI maturity score was 75% compared to the land-based supplier average of around 50% in early endorsement of our progress.

Across virtually every industry, companies are utilizing AI for enterprise efficiency and productivity gains. We see this as table stakes in AI, and we're no different to many companies in this respect. However, the key question extends well beyond these table stakes. We ask, how can AI be deployed to reinforce the generative -- and generate compounding gains that strengthen our company's strategic advantages. Aristocrat is focused in 3 key areas: enhancing creativity, improving velocity to market and advancing insights. In creativity, this means using AI for ideation, asset creation and general productivity. In velocity to market, it means reducing manual effort across development, testing and quality processes and converting games for additional markets. And with insights, it means using AI for analytics and decision support that ultimately support growth and improved player experiences.

For Aristocrat, AI becomes more valuable when it's applied to our existing capabilities and strengths and integrate it into our current or redesigned workflows to create compounding benefits at scale. For example, Today, we're embedding AI into our studio and engineering workflows to increase quantity, quality and speed of content creation. In addition, agenetic AI workflows are being deployed to accelerate delivery across channels and markets. And we're applying AI to proprietary data, providing deeper insights with richer context.

Over the next few slides, I will take a deeper look at how we are applying AI to truly amplify our advantage across these 3 key areas. Let's start with enhancing creativity. At Aristocrat, AI is amplifying, not replacing human creativity. Our designers, artists and game creators bring the ideas, judgment and craft that define our products. AI enhances that capability by freeing teams to spend more time on the highest value creative work. Today, AI is accelerating concept exploration, helping teams generate, iterate and evaluate creative design elements at speed, which enables more time and creative energy to be focused on the strongest ideas. It is supporting asset production by reducing time spent on repetitive lower-value production tasks such as base artwork, animation refinement and adopted -- adaptation of accretive packages while simultaneously increasing output. Importantly, AI is being embedded directly into studio workflows. Ultimately, this helps organize creative outputs, increases collaboration and improves scalability across teams.

We are enhancing creativity in a way that protects our proprietary content, brands and IP with strict governance protocols in place. So while AI amplifies our accretive engine, it does not dilute the strength of our IP or commoditize the player understanding or a craft that differentiates Aristocrat. One of the clearest examples of enhancing creativity through AI comes from Product Madness. Between 2021 and 2025, Product Madness increased creative output by roughly 75% and from approximately 8,000 creative assets to 14,000 while reducing the number of artists and designers required, and it wasn't just the quantity of content but the quality of content that saw a step change. This was only possible because Product Madness already possessed high-quality creative and other foundational capabilities required for successful deployment, including an engaged player base and the ability to commercialize these assets at scale.

Product Madness creative process has evolved rapidly and is scaling well. As we show on this slide, character-based storytelling previously required either an outsourced agency model or long internal hiring cycle, agencies deliver highly polished product, but their slow, expensive and capabilities remain external limiting our scalability. Hiring talent builds internal capabilities. However, it requires a long ramp-up period and fixed cost. Today, we're leveraging internal Product Madness talent augmented by Gen AI tools, capabilities -- and capabilities. This allows us to create high-quality immersive cinematic storytelling in around 6 to 8 weeks end-to-end which is a substantial productivity improvement while building the capability in-house.

Again, attaining this production level at scale is only possible because Product Madness already has a strong foundation required for successful AI deployment, which are proprietary assets, established characters and brands, strong game worlds and teams who understand both creativity and player behavior. It's this creative judgment and product knowledge in partnership with AI that is reinforcing, not undermining our strategic advantages at Product Madness.

The second major focus area is velocity to market. In the competitive world of gaming, speed matters. The faster we can move from concept to launch across channels, the more effectively we can capture opportunities and respond to market demand. AI is helping us accelerate multiple stages of the development life cycle, including prototyping, where it is helping us move more quickly from ideation to working concepts, quality and testing, where it's automating test generation and improving code reviews. AI is also facilitating game porting across channels. Through integrating AI workflows, we've been able to automate certain code conversions and standardize our game development kits. For example, our learnings from porting Lightning Link high stakes from social to interactive will allow us to deliver subsequent Lightning Link and other linked games significantly faster in the future.

And finally, on the regulatory front, we're using AI to compare regulatory requirements across jurisdictions identify potential areas of concern, generate technical documentation and support market entry requirements. The impact of AI deployment is clear. We're seeing extraordinary efficiency gains as time lines move from months to weeks and weeks to days, increasing our overall speed to market. An example of this is AI-assisted game porting, our pilot program to accelerate porting of content across channels. With product now being managed at the enterprise level, our studios are creating content for all channels with detailed sequencing plans established early in the process. This allows studios to execute on their cross-channel plans at speed by eliminating and adopting code conversion to particular channels and screen sizes, it enables faster conversion.

It further identifies reusable components across channels while helping to adapt for the nuances and compliance requirements of each. And then human expertise is applied throughout to ensure quality and consistency is maintained. The end result is more effective utilization of our great content across channels, allowing more players to enjoy more of our games wherever and whenever they want to play.

Finally, let's talk about advancing AI-powered insights. The gaming industry produces an enormous amount of data. Those that can better leverage that data to unlock insights at scale can drive significant value for themselves, for their customers and for the player. In Product Madness, which employs a B2C model, our data advantage is clear. While in gaming and interactive, although much of our data is owned by our customers, we still receive data from our lease games in our CSS and PAM platforms. By applying AI to these large data sets, we're able to drive insights that optimize performance in real time. This includes a greater understanding of content performance, which informs product strategy and facilitates iteration. It also improves player engagement by enabling personalization on digital platforms such as through serving the right live ops at the right time or offering personalized recommendations. But the next level of opportunity to unlock is applying our AI-powered insights to optimize performance for our customers, giving them the power to optimize their slot floors and improve their overall players' experience to drive value for all.

A great example is our recently acquired Gaming Analytics business. Gaming Analytics analyzes data and delivers actionable recommendations in real time. This enables operators to optimize their slot floor performance, marketing campaigns, player transactions, including promotions and responsible gameplay efforts and even informs host activities. The result is improved productivity and efficiency, greater return on investment and an overall improved player experience, which supports greater lifetime value. And most of all, it enables us to capture a greater slice of revenue across the gaming ecosystem and build on our strong long-term partnerships with our customers.

So in summary, while AI has been a part of our journey for a few years now, there is so much more to come. We're now deploying a genetic AI to redesign complex workflows, achieving impressive productivity and efficiency gains and also strengthening our strategic advantages. Our largest areas of benefit are enhancing our creativity, increasing our velocity to market and advancing insights that benefit Aristocrat and our customers. and the benefits do not stop here. AI initiatives are now being rolled out across the organization with the potential to improve almost every aspect of how we run the business. And we're really just getting started.

With that, I'll turn it back to Trevor.

Thanks, Bob. I'd now like to discuss our market-leading risk right gaming business and while we continue to see exceptional growth opportunities ahead. I'll focus on our unparalleled portfolio of content, award-leading talent and commercialization capabilities that are driving superior product performance and sustained share gains across major markets. We'll also cover our customer partnerships and growth opportunities and how we're investing to build scale and drive operating leverage. Gaming remains the largest contributor to Aristocrat's revenue and profit, reflecting the strength of our content and customer relationships and consistent effective execution over time.

Over the past decade, we've transformed our competitive position, particularly in North America and established leadership across both gaming operations and outright sales segments. In doing so, we have grown our revenues at 7% CAGR over the past 6 years, inclusive of the covid use. This is a remarkable track record. Importantly, we still believe we have substantial runway in this dynamic business. While we're confident that we'll continue to win in land-based gaming, we see significant opportunities for market share gains across our portfolio in both our core segments and also in adjacent markets new openings and through geographic expansion as markets regulate, and we focus on where we are currently underrepresented.

Our strategy is clear and compelling and effective. We will continue to innovate across content and hardware to drive performance while deepening customer partnerships. We'll leverage technology to facilitate fast reporting of content to adjacencies and new markets also driving scale efficiencies and operating leverage. In short, we believe we continue to win by taking market share and delivering growth above annual through harnessing our full range of capabilities underpinned by the strategic advantages that we've built to support this business.

Looking at content first. We have a tremendous breadth and depth of our product portfolio with our game spanning all major gaming segments and designed to serve the full spectrum of our diverse customers' needs. As you can see, we have maintained leading performance across all key segments over the time notwithstanding the significant increase in our footprint. In premium lease gaming, we continue to leverage and extend iconic franchises such as Buffalo, Lightning Link and Dragon Link as well newer innovations that have demonstrated exceptional player appeal. For example, Spooky Link started as a core game and has now begun extending gaming -- it's now being extended to gaming operations through speculate brand with encouraging early results at 2.6x house average with further channel extensions planned.

Premium licenses represent brands with proven relevance that appeal to both current and new slot players. The latest example is monopoly, it's already bringing players back to the Board. demonstrating strong early success as the top-ranked new premium lease game performing at 3.5x house average and with significant customer demand and player excitement. In Class II gaming, we continue to build on our legacy of BGT portfolio of games that players love while also leveraging leading Arica brands to serve this important market. 24 of the top 25 performing Class II mechanical reel games are ours, delivering 1.3x house average in the latest Ales report. And in our core outright sales business, we maintain a balanced portfolio to deliver value to customers across a broad range of investment profiles.

Our successful SpookyLink franchise dominated the top 3 positions of Performance leaderboards over the past year. It is the depth of our portfolio across numerous brands, mechanics and hardware configurations combined with consistent high game performance that truly differentiates Aristocrat. Producing this amazing content is our dedicated team of highly talented creatives. Our studios are empowered with generous creative freedom and autonomy and have access to advanced tools and technologies, our proprietary mass models and leading brands with consistent and leading D&D investment. At the same time, they all embrace a disciplined development framework, encompassing a multiyear product planning process. From early in the development process, our commercial teams work with our product teams and customers to develop detailed commercial and marketing strategies to optimize placements and drive success.

Throughout the process, results attract insights are captured and strategies to refine driving further demand and sustainable growth. A great example of this strategy in action was the recent release of Buffalo Mega Stampede. Launched only 10 months ago, this title has quickly grown its installed base over 1,500 units, and demand continues to remain strong. Today, we've penetrated almost 60% of our targeted accounts and generated over 10 million digital media impressions. And we have plans to extend the successful game franchise to more markets, adjacencies and channels. While each game is nuanced and tailored our commercialization strategy is repeatable and scalable yielding consistently strong results.

Co-brand and content execution will be on show in the second half of 20 with our land-based business set up well for a second half and into FY '27. We launched many new titles that are consistently ranked at the top end of less performance reports such as Buffalo Mega Stampede and BaojuYaoFu Firecracker Express, and we have an exceptionally strong pipeline for the second half of the year. We expect recent launch titles such as Lightning year tenured Biting 10-year store. Spooky Grand and the highly anticipated MONOPOLY Big Board bucks to hit their stride in the second half of 2016, contributing meaningfully. We have several other exciting proven franchise launches planned for the remainder of the year and into FY '27. It is the strength of this pipeline that underpinned our confidence to increase our gaming operations, net unit additions guidance at the top of our 4,000 to 5,000 range in May.

Our visibility into the sales pipeline and strong gain performance gives us confidence that we'll continue to grow our gaming operations revenue. Taking a closer look at gaming operations. Our recurring revenue segment has been a major driver of shareholder value over time. Over the last decade, Aristocrat has driven the premiumization of the casino floor. We did this by steadily investing in D&D, which has delivered consistent superior performance. Our going performance is currently indexing around 40% above our nearest competitor. With this game performance leadership, we added over 25,000 premium units over the 7-year period shown -- representing 80% of the net unit additions amongst the top 3 players and taking our installed base to over 77,000 units. That is almost a 50% increase.

Today, our gaming operations footprint is larger than our nearest 2 competitors combined, and our revenue share is even greater. This is a strategic advantage that has taken years to build through disciplined investment of the long and the strong cash flow generated by this business, and we firmly believe we have room to grow.

Turning to outright sales. Our investments in content, hardware and commercialization have also generated significant share gains in outright sales with Aristocrat achieving its highest North American ship share and revenue share ever in the first half of the year and ranking as the #1 indexing supplier. We expect a significant contribution in the second half of '26 from the highly successful Australian franchise Thunder Empire, which is off to a strong start in the U.S. The combination of compelling games and differentiated cabinet configuration creates a powerful value proposition for operators. As a result, we continue to gain share whilst generating attractive returns to customers while maintaining ASP.

Notwithstanding our leadership position, we see potential for further share gains across both gaming operations and outright sales. Today, our share of the top-performing lease and core games will exceed our market share of the AGM footprint across both segments and play a significant headroom for growth should operators continue to optimize floors around game performance. We remain focused on extending our leadership position across these priority segments. The RMG market is an excellent example of our ability to execute. Following increased competitive pressure, we implemented a disciplined strategy with renewed investment behind innovative content and hardware, customer engagement and commercial execution. The result has been a meaningful recovery in market share from 30% to 49% in the first quarter of 26%. We expect this momentum to continue with new exciting titles to be highlighted at AGM including Phoenix Link, which will soon be launching in New South Wales.

In the services business, we see increased potential to grow our ANZ footprint and recurring revenues as a partner with our customers. This outcome demonstrates the strength of our capability and resolve and reinforces that when Aristocrat focuses resources behind a strategic objective, we have the ability and track record to execute and win.

Another key differentiator and strategic focus of Aristocrat is the strength of our customer relationships. Now where is this more evident than in tribal gaming. Tribal Gaming represents around half of the North American gaming landscape with over 530 casinos and 400,000 AGMs. The tribes generate significant economic benefit in the state where they are present, supporting their communities. Aristocrat's tribal relationships have been built over decades, and we've invested in tailored Class II content and beloved brands and features that resonate with local players. We're extending this commitment online through iGaming, Class II mobile and wage. Our commitment extends beyond products to support a community engagement, workforce development and tribal sovereignty issues. The trust we have established represents a meaningful strategic advantage that supports the strong recurring revenue portion of our portfolio and ultimately, the long-term growth.

Strongest validation of our customer strategy comes directly from our partners. Aristocrat has been recognized as a leading supplier for 8 consecutive years, and our Net Promoter Scores remain exceptionally strong across geographies and customer segments. Specifically, our customers consistently highlighted our product performance, innovation and partnership quality as differentiators. The feedback reinforces our belief that success comes from creating value for customers rather than simply selling products and that when our customers win, we win.

Beyond share gains in our core business, adjacencies represent an exciting growth opportunity in markets where we are underpenetrated. We are disciplined in the entry and scaling of adjacency markets, ensuring product hardware and route to market are well understood and planned. Adjacencies are markets where we have no market share are growing or expanding through regulation and where we have the capability to create compelling product solutions. Individually and collectively, these segments represent a significant unit TAM and meaningful revenue opportunity. While adjacencies growth can vary across periods and have lower ASPs they represent attractive incremental growth with strong ROI.

It's important to note that Aristocrat only recently added adjacencies, while we have achieved early success in several of these segments with an average of 16% share across adjacencies where we participate, there is potential share upside in the existing markets compared to our significantly higher market shares in gaming operations and outright sales across our gaming plus new markets where we are yet to enter. Moreover, and as additional jurisdictions regulatory frameworks evolve, we think attractive market opportunities will emerge. We see additional opportunities to gain share through new openings and expansion. Given our superior gain performance across markets, Aristocrat tends to achieve a greater floor allocation of new openings than existing floors reflecting our strong contemporary portfolio as operators seek to optimize performance. With several key expansions expected through FY '27 across the UAE, EMEA and Asia and the usual expansion in the North American market, we see strong share gain potential.

As our business continues to scale, we remain focused on profitable growth with a focus on various levers to achieve operating leverage. The simplification of organizational structures across geographies is improving execution and efficiency as we grow while optimizing our growth optimizing our supply chain is lowering our manufacturing costs while building resiliency. Meanwhile, we're using AI to digitize manual tasks, restructure our workflows and drive productivity, and this should yield increasing savings over time. We also remain focused on optimizing our investment behind priority growth initiatives and enhancing our productivity -- commercial productivity through joint customer planning and execution across gaming and interactive, improving the experience for our highest-value customers.

In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with the following takeaways. Aristocrat Gaming is a leader in a large, attractive and growing market. We are focused and committed to winning in land-based gaming with a leading contact brands and IP. Our outstanding creative talent and proven commercialization capabilities continue to outpace the industry. Our long-term customer partnerships are also a strategic differentiator, and we see potential to better serve our customers and expand services. We are a growth business with deep foundations built over the last decade and are exceptionally well positioned for our next phase of growth.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Dafne to discuss Product Madness.

Thanks, Trevor, and good morning, everyone. I'm Dafne Guisard. I'm the Chief Commercial Officer for EMEA, and I also oversee product madness, and I'm pleased to be here today to talk about the business. As I'm relatively new to Aristocrat, let me briefly introduce myself. Before joining early this year, I spent more than 2 decades leading growth transformation, digital innovation and large-scale operations across global consumer businesses, mostly in highly regulated and fast-moving industries. Most recently, I served as the COO at Entain helping drive operational excellence across more than 30 regulated markets. Before that, I held senior leadership roles at a beam Bev and Kraft Heinz, where I led large-scale digital data, AI transformations across commercial product supply chain and customer-facing organizations.

What attracted me to Aristocrat was the combination of exceptional talent, strong creative capabilities and a culture that constantly embraces innovation. Have now spent some time with the business. I'm even more excited about the opportunity ahead.

Today, I would like to show how Product Madness unique strengths have helped us outperform market and why this still position the business for sustainable long-term growth. There are 4 key messages I would like you to take it away. First, content. Content remains our most important competitive advantage and is our primary growth engine. Second, Product Madness operating model is the winning formula that sets us apart. Third, AI is helping us move faster and create richer players' experiences at scale. And fourth, disciplined user acquisitions, combined with direct consumer migration is supporting both growth and profitability.

Let's start with the business itself. Product Madness is one of the world's leading free-to-play mobile gaming businesses. We focus exclusively on social slots, and we are a significant contributor to Aristocrat's revenue and profit. Importantly, we operate a business-to-consumer model and the direct relationship with our players gives us a powerful first-party data capability, one that we can leverage across content, live ops, user acquisition, direct commerce and AI. Today, we are the clear leader in software lots globally with almost 24% market share. And while the category is mature, we've consistently grown share and deliver around 5% growth in bookings over recent years. And that goes up to 9%, including the boost from the covid years, and that's a strong track record in any market.

We've consistently grown faster than the category even when the broader social slots market has declined. And that performance reflects 4 things: strong content, deep player understanding operational discipline and the agility to operate at scale. And what gives me confidence is that this is not a one-off result. It is a repeatable model, and one that continues to create opportunity for us to grow and take share. While orders see category pressure, we see opportunity, opportunity to take share, opportunity to grow revenue and opportunity to further strengthen our leadership position.

In our core markets, we see potential to drive stronger engagement but we also see additional growth prospects across EMEA. And while DTC has already grown to 24% of revenues at half year '26, we believe there is 2 runway ahead. And we are pursuing these opportunities from a position of strength with access to award winning land-based content with scale, with focus and leading apps and increasingly with AI embedded across the product life cycle.

Our operating model is built around 3 drivers: content, continuous improvement in disciplined UA. First, we leverage Aristocrat's iconic land base across our proprietary to first brands. This gives us access to market-leading IP beloved brands and proven mechanics. This multichannel advantage is difficult to replicate in our category. Our commitment to continuous improvement starts with a simple principle. Every decision begins with the player and the player's journey across the product life cycle. Our model is also built around disciplined investment, not as a simple growth lever, but as a long-term driver of player value and sustainable returns. And finally, AI is enhancing every part of the operating model. It is improving the quantity and quality of content and enable more impactful insights.

Content remains the simple -- the single most important driver of our success. In the first half of 2026, delivered several outstanding examples of that leadership. Lightning Link extended its position as the #1 gross in social casino app globally. And in February, it achieved its highest ever daily average revenue. For the first time, Cashman Casino surpassed $1 million revenues in a single day. And today, it ranks as the #3 social casino app worldwide. Heart of Vegas delivered 20 consecutive months of year-on-year growth, alongside record high customer satisfaction scores in February. And finally, Mighty Casino delivered approximately 90% growth. Taken together, these achievements culminated in product maintenance be named the Social Casino -- operator of the Year by Eilers, reflecting creativity, the commitment and the hard work of our talented team. Content leadership is about much more than launching successful games. It is about continuous innovation, keeping our games fresh, keeping them exciting and keeping them relevant. So our players return time and time again.

We are using data and customer insights to deliver live ops experiences, mini games, franchise-based events and meta progression systems at scale, and there are several examples of that in action. The use of a replicable mini game framework in delivering live ops, including risk in [indiscernible] and treasure hunt features to Heart of Vegas. But we are also very proud of our spoke experiences we create such as combining existing apps with our beloved land-based characters as we did with the [indiscernible] takeover. We also create experiences with richer player engagement and emotional connection with our players. A great example is Cashman Casino, where we used the metal layers to enhance the player experience. It's our ability to learn, cross-pollinate and personalized experiences at scale that is central to raising the bar. It is how we gain share. It is how we win.

Another important contributor to our success is the strength of our platform's partnerships. Historically, many global publishers who view platforms relationships as largely transactional, but we take a different approach. For us, these are strategic partners. They are critical to supporting our growth, our execution and economics. Our joint business planning with our partners such as Apple, Google, Meta, we gain access to better tools, deeper insights and increased technical support. These benefits are quite tangible. In the first half of 2026, substantial increases in partner rebates compared to the same period last year, helped us maintain the investment levels elsewhere.

These relationships also provide access to technical expertise to regulatory roundtables to data to insights and that support our critical projects. And this gives us greater visibility and help us support best-in-class execution. AI is a significant growth enabler and Product Madness was an earlier adopter and our direct payer relationships created a stronger foundation for practical adoption. First, we are deploying AI in player analytics. Machine learn help us serve the right experiences at the right time.

Next, our creative and engineering teams are using AI to increase productivity inefficiency across all facets of development, all the way from concept to go live. This enabled our teams to produce better content at a greater speed and scale allowing our people to focus on higher-value work. We are creating significant more output with the same number of staff. It's more output. It is higher quality without scaling resources. And we are also building a knowledge base across product development and operations. This provides the foundation for AI agents to learn to build and to operate alongside our team. And these AI engines will continue to evolve, benefiting our game development and operations. User acquisition remains 1 of our most important growth investments. And it is about much more than acquiring players. The return in UA comes from combined efficient acquisition with great content and strong engagement.

When those elements come together, the players we acquired today continue creating value for the years to come. That's why we view UA as a long-term investment, not simply as a market expensive. Direct to consumer is equally important. The strategic value goes beyond the economics of lower platform fees. As more players engage directly with us, we deepen our understanding of behaviors and preferences, and that allow us to deliver more personalized experiences, which drives long-term value. Together, disciplined UA and D2C expansions are supporting both growth and profitability.

In summary, our strategy is clear. Our opportunities are significant, and we believe Product Madness is uniquely positioned to extend its leadership in social slots. We will continue to innovate at scale and build richer player experiences. We will also utilize AI to improve speed to market and supercharge capabilities. We have a strong track record and our strategy is fully focused on continuing to outperform the category.

And with that, I'll turn back to James. Thank you.

Thanks, Dafne. We're running well on time. So we'll take a short 10-minute break now. When we resume, and that will be approximately 20 minutes past the hour, Dylan will she in-depth review of our progress at Interactive. So just before we go, a reminder, you can submit questions throughout today's session. Just select that messaging icon that you can see on the screen, type your question into the inbox and send it to us. And thanks for those who have already submitted questions.

[Break]

Good morning, and welcome back for the second part of today's investor briefing. I'm Dylan Slaney, CEO of Ascot Interactive, and I started with the business back in November 25. As I genuinely believe, this is one of the most exciting opportunities for growth in our gaming globally. -- and we are still in the early stages of unlocking the full potential of this amazing business. During my career, I've had the opportunity to lead and scale businesses across data-driven consumer that industries and most recently within iGaming, where I've had a front row seat experience in the growth of this amazing industry. As I've learned more about the Aristocrat business and spent time with the team, I'm even more excited about the opportunity and what we can deliver together by building high-quality digital capabilities, aligning talent behind a clear vision, using data intelligently but doing it with discipline, pace and ambition. What really stood out to me with Interactive is the strength of the foundations that were already in place, the technology, the talent, but most importantly, the backing of the Aristocrat ecosystem. And it's clear that this is a business with real momentum, and it's my role to help focus that energy as we move into the next phase of growth. So today is about clarity and confidence. We want to show you how we're thinking about the opportunity, how we're prioritizing investment and how this team is positioned to execute.

We will begin by outlining how interactive has progressed since the last Investor Day and step through the market dynamics and the pathway we see to scale growth, including how we see interactive contributing to long-term value creation within aristocrat. We'll outline the core of our strategy is anchored in 2 growth engines: content and lottery, where we believe Astocrat has a huge opportunity with real momentum building. We will also cover our connected digital capabilities and talk about why we are confident that these will enhance our strengths.

Let's start with a quick look at the business today. Most of you will be familiar with our relative size, where Aristocrat's smallest division, contributing around 10% of revenues. However, it's the business that has the most potential to scale. While today, revenue

contributions are currently weighted towards our platform business, I'll be sharing why we expect content and iLottery to scale over time. But I think before that, it's important to spend time reflecting on interactive journey over the last 2 years.

You'll recall at the last Investor Day in June 24, we outlined a clear ambition to build a scaled interactive business. The investment case was anchored in 3 core areas: content distribution expansion, iLottery leadership and growth and platform and systems integration. These still hold true today, and we have achieved many important milestones along the journey. However, as we have unified the interactive business, we recognized we needed a more cohesive strategy to position us more aggressively for growth. And along that journey, there's been many valuable lessons over the last 2 years that has helped shape this more focused strategy. Consolidating a number of diverse businesses into a unified framework was a complex undertaken. And the need for portfolio focus and prioritization became clear as we integrated. That's why we made a disciplined decision to exit the white label business, which didn't meet our internal return and scalability hurdles.

The scale of content has been more measured than expected. And we've -- as we've navigated slower market access, longer regulatory time lines and also technology integration challenges. But guided by these learnings, we've shifted our approach to ensure that every resource is aligned to the highest priority and highest value opportunities. We're confident this sharper discipline positions us to navigate complexity with more intent and purpose, allowing us to respond to changing dynamics within our industry with more agility. But also as we've adapted, the external landscape has also been evolving. Historically, industry growth was driven by rapid geographic and unregulated expansion, new market openings and quickly scaling their distribution. Today, growth is more nuanced. Mature markets are expanded at a more measured pace with tighter regulatory frameworks impacting USI gaming growth. Consequently, operator and supplier consolidation is reshaping the competitive landscape.

There's also been an increased focus on adjacent and emerging models, including prediction markets and sweepstakes, where regulatory dynamics are continually evolving. In this environment, Sustainable iGaming growth is no longer just about breadth. It's about depth, differentiation, execution and strong digital capability. While our lottery also continues to expand driven by increased digital penetration and new jurisdictions moving into digital, player expectations for digital content are also evolving. And within land-based gaming, digital transformation is accelerating from things like cashless payments to multichannel engagement. And its connected digital experience that presents multiple opportunities to help customers and players navigate this transition.

So as you've heard, we now have some strong and firm foundations in place. We've simplified the portfolio and exited lower return activities, consolidated platforms and prioritized key markets and core growth areas. At the same time, we've strengthened the business, adding targeted leadership and deepened our digital capabilities. But what has fundamentally changed is our ability to execute. We now have a clearer strategy and have established a stronger execution discipline. And as we look ahead, this is a business that has largely completed its reset and is now ready to accelerate its execution.

So let's take a deeper look at the interactive strategy. At the heart, our 2 primary growth engines. In content, the priority is to scale our proven land-based franchises online, where we already have strong and leading positions. We are building a pipeline of leading brands with launches sequence to maximize player impact and build enduring brand franchises. This shifts the business from opportunistic output to deliberate brand-led growth. iLottery represents a structurally attractive long-term growth opportunity, combining the strength of our technology platforms, content and managed services. With strong customer engagement and increasing digital adoption, iLottery provides a powerful engine for recurring revenue growth. And these 2 core engines are complemented by a set of platforms and technology-led growth initiatives, including Game and Player IQ, tribal gaming digital expansion through our Class II mobile offering, cashless capabilities and invested in our content distribution platform encompassing both first and third-party content and I'll expand on these later in the presentation.

But let's now take a deeper look at these 2 core growth engines. It's fair to say our content growth has been slower than initially anticipated. This has been driven by a combination of market timing, regulatory change and also the need to modernize parts of our technology stack. Our resolve to shift this is on wavering and relentless. We remain focused on many opportunities in regulated markets where we believe we have the capabilities to win capitalizing on our leading positions in land-based and in social casino. And the size of the content price in the U.S. is substantial. The regulated U.S. iSlots market is projected to expand to $12 billion by 2029, around a 10% CAGR from 2025 with further growth anticipated should more states regulate our gaming. And our current content share stands just below 4%.

This is significantly below what we believe to be our rightful share. And this alone represents a substantial growth opportunity to replicate share gains we have already delivered in our land and social channels.

There are also market shifts occurring that play to our strengths. The 3 largest iGaming in U.S. states are moving from expansion to optimization, where returns are driven by content quality, content differentiation and strong player engagement. So how will we achieve our content strategy? The primary aim of our strategy is focused on unlocking the potential of our proven land-based brands online. We will deliver this through focused distribution via our content hub and a wager. We will localize based on market preferences and regulatory requirements and maximize franchise value by creating brand extensions and variations to keep games fresh and players engaged. We believe we will win because our proven land-based content already resonates with online players. And we're leveraging our deep performance data to further derisk launches.

In addition, we are utilizing AI to accelerate the porting of our content from land to digital. And we now have a commercial team of industry-leading talent with significant iGaming experience. And it's this combination that turns market opportunity into repeatable, predictable growth. And confidence in our strategy stems from ownership of the most powerful franchises in global gaming with proven demand, proven mechanics, and proven engagement. These brands hold top positions in land-based and social casino channels with deep player loyalty that drives sustained performance over time. A great example is the soon-to-launch Lightman Link. It's the #1 grossing social casino app globally and the third top gross in land-based parent family. Dragonlink has also consistently ranked as the top index in land-based parent game year in and year out, and SpookyLink has led its core segment since launch.

These examples are not single games. They are leading franchises with multiple variants and extensions we can bring online. We'll do this in a sequenced manner to maximize player engagement and franchise value. We have an exceptional world-leading library of leading brands and games across both Class II and Class III, which gives us a long runway for future growth. Phoenix Link is another great example of this potential. Now one of the best-performing games within the Social Casino likely in Link app. And it's the strength of these top-ranking land-based brands, that lowers execution risks and accelerates our path to scale. We now have clarity in our content strategy and confidence in how we scale. A core driver of this strategy is our one-to-many approach for maximizing franchise value, whereby we systematically scale titles across our digital ecosystem.

For example, we start by utilizing a brand in a wager to enable remote slot play, providing a true land-based slot experience to digital players. This requires minimal new game investment. We then extend each franchise directly into iGaming, first through the core game and then through clones, derivatives and seasonal variance. This keeps games fresh, deepens player engagement and lifetime value and ultimately turns a successful land-based game into a scalable multichannel online franchise. This is a repeatable, scalable and profitable model.

Moving now to iLottery, where interactive is uniquely positioned to deliver high-quality growth in a rapidly expanding iLottery market with strong structural tailwinds. Today, we operate from a position of strength with almost 70% share of U.S. iLottery gross wages being generated through our platform, giving us scale and data and insight advantages. The U.S. market is expected to grow at around 30% CAGR through to 2029, driven by increased digital penetration and continued product innovation. New jurisdictions moving online is an incremental key driver of future market growth. Multiple states are currently in discussion to regulate iLottery and we expect several RFPs to be announced in the coming years. States will continue to look for new sources of revenue, but also to create connected experiences for their players across land and online. And looking forward, we believe we are well positioned given our execution track record, superior

technology platforms and planned innovation strategy.

So why are we confident? Let's look at our footprint first. We today operate in 5 of the 10 regulated iLottery states, soon to be 6 with Massachusetts going live later this month. Three of these contracts operate through the Neopollard interactive joint venture. But these are not simply transactional contracts. Relationships sit at the core and we are deeply embedded in our customers' digital operations, their technology stack and increasingly in their player engagement strategies. These long-term trusted partnerships drive recurring revenue. The embedded nature of these contracts, combined with our years of success, strongly position us to win, scale and retain programs. And while the JV has been a success, what you are now seeing is a clear progression towards interactive winning contracts outright as we own the technology and have built even deeper relationships.

New Hampshire, Michigan and Massachusetts are great examples of this shift. That transition improves the economics and is expected to contribute to growth in future years. On our iLottery growth strategy, leverages strategic assets and advantages across the Aero scrap Group as we scale this long duration technology and services business. Our strategy is multipronged, focusing on existing programs and winning RFPs for new business. The expertise of our industry-leading talent, combined with our proven technology are expected to drive our success. We also have plans to deliver Aristocrat's leading brands into the iLottery space. And we believe we will win because we have trusted long-term partnerships, a factor not to be underestimated.

Our leading performance is also a strong differentiator. As a strategic partner to our iLottery operators, we sit at the heart of our customers' digital platforms and operating model. This level of connection is not easily replicated, supporting a durable business that delivers profit visibility and strong cash flow resilience. And recently, we've had a lot of questions about Massachusetts trajectory once it goes live. So I'd like to share a case study to demonstrate how a typical contract can scale.

New Hampshire was Interactive's first major iLottery win in the U.S. And as you can see, performance has been very strong, generating the vast majority of total lottery growth. The program increased penetration to roughly 45% in just 7 years. This rapid scaling delivered a 40% CAGR over the period, while retail continued to grow at a steady 4%. This is strong proof that digital complements rather than cannibalizes traditional sales with increased accessibility, expanding the overall target audience. And whilst each market will have its own nuances, New Hampshire provides an illustration of the potential for our new iLottery contracts.

With respect to Massachusetts, it has a population over 6x the size of New Hampshire and a per capita lottery spend that is almost double, making it the highest per capita lottery market in the U.S. and the third largest globally. We expect Massachusetts to significantly contribute to Interactive's growth over time with potential to scale into 1 of our most successful contracts. And our iLottery performance versus our peers is another factor that gives us confidence in our growth ambitions. Aristocrat's powered programs have consistently delivered stronger growth, generating more than double the per capital sales of the nearest competitor and several times that of others. Moreover, U.S. lotteries using Aristocrat's digital platform and content have delivered 46% per capita gross sales growth since 2021, and compared to just 4% for lotteries on competitors' platforms. This level of outperformance demonstrates an advantage that compounds as we capture learnings and increasingly leverage data to support our experienced teams, enhance our capabilities and innovate across our platforms and content, all in a tightly integrated operator model with a partnership and growth mindset.

For lotteries, choosing a digital partner, the evidence is clear. Aristocrat-powered programs have demonstrated superior performance over an extended period of time. performance, scales, engagement deepens and returns accelerate. And beyond our content and iLottery growth engines, we are investing in digital capabilities that connect our land-based and digital networks and deepen our existing relationships with operators and players. These are not stand-alone bets, but rather think about it as an integrated ecosystem. Each one has the potential to extend an existing strength, expand our revenue pool and create connected experience-led digital capabilities.

To start, Game and Player IQ builds and our lead in CXS land-based casino systems footprint and the recent gaming Analytics acquisition. It leverages data, AI to analyze EGM performance in real time to help operators make sharper venue and player decisions. This includes slot for optimization, marketing, loyalty, compliance and many other parts of the player journey. And in time, we expect this to extend into digital enabling a connected player experience across multiple channels. Class II Mobile enables our longstanding tribal partners to efficiently offer mobile Class II on trust land. As sovereign nations, these customers are not dependent on state legalization time lines. Moreover, our leading Class II content will be a cornerstone for any tribal market launch.

Cashless Wallet modernizes venue operations, increases loyalty and deepens engagement through enabling a more connected patron experience, whilst also supporting regulatory agendas. And finally, Content Hub supports our customers' broader content growth strategies through providing 1 access point for operators to manage both Aristocrat and third-party content. And together, these 4 initiatives have the potential to extend our existing customer relationships and content into new accretive recurring revenue streams.

So as I've outlined, we've done a lot of the heavy lifting and now have the foundations in place to execute at scale. This started with strengthening our leadership team bringing in experienced operational, commercial and technology talent and better enabling our team. We've also materially upgraded our technology foundations, making it more robust and scalable to enable a more consistent delivery and drive operating leverage. We've adopted a strategic approach to capital allocation decisions, ensuring resources are focused on the highest value opportunities and our customers and players are at the center of everything that we do.

Together, this enables increased coordination and tight alignment across our content, platform and commercial teams, improving speed to market, consistency of execution and overall delivery quality for our customers and players. So how does this all translate into revenues and profits for Interactive? We've shared the more significant take rates on this page before. And I won't go into the detail on each one. However, there are some important points to make. A fundamental strength is that we participate in the core areas of the value chain focusing on areas where we have real capability and strategic advantages. This enables us to capture a healthy share of margin across the RMG ecosystem.

In content, this includes in first party where we believe we can leverage our leading brands to capture a greater portion of NGR towards the higher end of the range shown and through third-party content, which leverages our existing game serving technology. Within iLottery, we bring our content and platforms together in a more integrated, higher-value model. The overall result is a resilient, higher-quality revenue base that doesn't depend on any single driver or any change in consumer sentiment. This is a privileged vantage point to benefit from structural growth across core areas of the online RMG market.

And as we approach the finishing line today, let's round this out and focus on the USD 1 billion revenue target. We presented an indicative pathway to achieve this target on the slide. This includes meaningful contributions from each of our segments. While there is still much work to be done, we are confident in the drivers and in our ability to execute. In content, we intend to accelerate delivery of Aristocrat's proven leading brands and IP to gain share in U.S. markets and priority international markets with plans to quickly launch in regulated geographies as they open up. These franchises and mechanics already over-index in land and social, and we believe we'll have strong player demand and residents in our gaming with Light and Link, probably the most anticipated launch in the industry today.

In iLottery, we expect to increase penetration and scale existing programs and leverage our superior track record to win new RFPs. We anticipate further increasing wallet share through penetration of managed services and innovating across our content offering. Ultimately, introduced in Aristocrat brands to the iLottery ecosystem. And in platforms, we expect to further monetize our platform capabilities, Game and Player IQ, mobile Class 2 and cashless by selling new high-value services into our existing and strong customer base. These are revenue opportunities that expand our share of the economics, deepen our customer relationships, and ultimately enable more connected digital experience across the gaming ecosystem.

The growth ranges we've shared reflect the variability of outcomes that we can't control entirely including the pace of new market legalizations and any changes in broader macro conditions. By definition, we don't anticipate that growth will be linear. However, we are confident that we have a well-considered strategy to build interactive over time as the business scales and as opportunities emerge.

So to recap. Interactive has undertaken a deliberate reset that was necessary and intentional. We have emerged a more focused and execution-ready organization well positioned to deliver sustainable, higher-quality value creation. We have 2 phenomenal growth engines in content and iLottery with deep expertise, strong relationships and considerable potential and headroom to scale. We expect these to be supplemented by new connected digital capabilities that further embeds into our customers' operating model, adding value to operators and ultimately players. Today, Interactive is ready to capture share and deliver quality growth through focus and operational discipline. We're at the start of an exciting journey that we believe will deliver for shareholders for many years to come.

And thank you. With that, I will turn it over to Sally.

Thanks, Dylan, and good morning, everyone. I'm Sally Denby, I'm the CFO of Aristocrat. Today, I will talk how we financially support and help drive the long-term growth of the business, including how we are managing the company's cost structure and balance sheet to enable execution of the enterprise strategy. I'll start by recapping our performance aspirations. I will then talk about our One Aristocrat operating model and how we facilitate the more collaborative approach and in doing so creates efficiency gains across the enterprise. Finally, I'll turn to our capital allocation framework and how it both enables our strategy and optimizes long-term shareholder returns.

Trevor discussed our growth strategy in depth. I would like to focus on the performance aspirations. You've heard about our plans to continue to take market share across our businesses throughout the day, and Dylan elaborated on our pathway to $1 billion revenue interactive. I would like to expand upon our plans to drive disciplined EBITA margin expansion while also continuing to invest behind key priorities. This includes revenue growth outpacing investment in D&D over the long term. and allocating capital in an effective and balanced manner across the portfolio to support sustainable enterprise growth.

In 2024, we took an in-depth look at our business, and what was required to achieve our financial goals and execute at scale into the future. This included the acquisition of NeoGames to create a scaled player in online RMG. It also included the restructuring of Product Madness, including the divestment of Clarin Big Fish to become a focused social slots operator fully aligned from a content perspective with our broader portfolio. But to truly realize our vision, harness the full power of our scale, capabilities and customer reach and support the next phase of growth, we also needed to redesign our organization to achieve increased coordination and operating leverage. We call this new operating model, One Aristocrat, and it is an important enabler of both growth and efficiency across the enterprise. The first steps we're bringing together a majority of our global product and technology resources from across the businesses into scaled operations span in the organization. Following this, we applied the same approach to our key corporate support pensions bringing global resources together under their relevant executive leader.

In doing so, we are driving towards a truly global metrics organization, resulting in strengthened enterprise-wide coordination decision-making and governance. In particular, One Aristocrat enables us to set priorities and enterprise level, making effective and balanced investment allocations to drive long-term value aligned with our overall strategy, leveraged shared capabilities, including content, platforms, customer relationships and corporate functions to drive revenue and operating leverage. Simplify removed duplication and reduce complexity across our global footprint, including our corporate and legal structures and embed AI into our workflows and operations to drive productivity and sustainable operational improvements.

One Aristocrat also supports operating leverage, which remains a key focus as we continue to scale the business. Aristocrat has delivered consistent and impressive improvement in both segment profit and EBITA margins over time across the portfolio. Continuing to do so requires us to consistently manage the cost base and drive productivity improvements to deliver operating leverage as we scale. We balance this against the need to deploy capital to further our long-term strategic goals. This includes diversifying earnings across the 3 segments, investing in new opportunities and managing risk across the portfolio.

In the near term, our ongoing cost optimization efforts are expected to achieve approximately $100 million of annualized savings during FY '27, reflecting a consistent approach to cost discipline. This is combined with ongoing scale benefits across the organization.

In the end, this is about ensuring growth is delivered with clear financial discipline balancing short-term performance against long-term investment, such that scale translates into improved margins and returns. In doing so, we create capacity for additional strategic reinvestment to fuel continuous growth. Our capital allocation framework remains disciplined and consistent, balanced in organic investment, targeted M&A and returns to shareholders. It is supported by a strong balance sheet and flexible capital structure, reflecting deliberate strategic choices to deliver the best financial outcomes for Aristocrat and its shareholders. It is also supported by consistently strong cash flow conversion across the group. This includes our approach to the refinancing of our debt early this year and the resulting benefits achieved for the group.

The refinancing achieved attractive rates, reflecting our investment grade profile. We also expanded our revolving credit facility while reducing our fixed term debt. This structure increases our liquidity while providing additional flexibility and capacity to support future opportunities. And with this financing in place, in May, we announced an extension to our existing buyback program taking the total authorization to $2.5 billion. Buybacks remain an important and ongoing part of our capital allocation framework, reinforcing our commitment to optimizing total shareholder returns.

So in summary, we continue to actively manage the company's financial structure to provide operating leverage and support the long-term growth of the business. As you've heard, our One Aristocrat operator model is designed to increase coordination and collaboration across the enterprise and actively manage our cost base. In doing so, it provides the fuel to invest behind long-term growth initiatives and allows us to manage D&D more effectively to achieve scale benefits. Our consistent capital allocation framework supported by active management and optimization of our balance sheet, provides strategic flexibility and structure to support business execution, which ultimately drives sustainable shareholder returns. Overall, we remain confident in the outlook for FY '26 and the longer-term growth trajectory of the business.

And with that, I'll turn back to James to start the Q&A. Thank you.

Thanks, Sally. Well, let that ends the more formal part of our briefing. And thank you to all the speakers for their contributions. Thanks very much for keeping in time. It freed up a good bit of time for Q&A now. So just a reminder, who is on the call in Las Vegas with me, we've got Dylan, Dafne and Superna; Trevor and Sally are in Sydney and Bob is available remotely as well for questions on AI. And thanks to all the people who've already put questions in a steady flow coming in. Thanks to all the analysts. And a reminder, there is a button on your screen, so please submit questions, and we'll try and get to all of them.

Okay. Well, let's get going. I'll go to Trevor first. There's a presubmitted question from an investor, and I'll read it. There are so many confusing economic signals currently, especially deteriorating confidence in Australia more recently. Could you or any of you exec, please comment on where you're seeing any consumer softness across the business?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think, first of all, we look at consumer confidence against GGR. And at the moment, GGR continues to be above consumer confident as far as consumer spend goes. And that's consistent across most of our markets globally. Also, if that's consistent for our -- if you break it down to the gaming business, in the regional or drive markets such as tribal and regional corporate casinos continue to see strong numbers for GGR, and you would have seen some recent prints around the strength of the regional markets and the drive markets for North America and even some response improvement in the Las Vegas and New Jersey markets, which are quite small in our overall portfolio.

If you then think about the Australian market continues to be strong despite the headlines that we read, consumer confidence continues to be there. And we also see across our portfolio, the strength of our Slots portfolio, which is delivering above other sectors in gaming. Also the iLottery component, which we continue to see strong performance as well and in social casino, which is growing above consumer spend. So we haven't seen anything today and the operators continue to support and report reasonable and strong performance.

Thanks, Trevor. There are unsurprisingly quite a few questions coming through on Interactive. And most of these are focused on the bridge to the $1 billion revenue target. So I'll start with 1 that goes back to 2024 when we first set that target. So I'll put that 1 to you, Trevor, and this has come through from Matt Ryan at Barrenjoey, and I'll read it. Since announcing the $1 billion target in June 2024 U.S. iCasino market growth has slowed and new state openings for our Casino and iLottery have been limited. Did you always anticipate these dynamics? Or which areas are you more confident about now, which will get you to that target?

Yes. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate the question. I think when we came to market in '24, we said that we weren't reliant on market openings for us to be confident around our target. But what we did say is that we would improve our penetration both in the customers and our product portfolio as Dylan outlined in his presentation, a lot of the growth in moving towards the iLottery, the $1 billion lottery target is coming from content and in ologic, which are both areas where and particularly in the iLottery space have a strong market position and the ability to improve performance.

If I go back to the second part of the question really about did we anticipate it? It has been slower than we anticipated, but we're now dealing with around 94% of the North American customer base. And we've now got access to main coming online. Overall, we feel that as the market expands and markets open, that we are actually well positioned for market openings where we'll be able to take content live from day 1 into those new markets as they open and continue to leverage our content share in the existing markets. As far as iLottery goes, continuing to improve the performance of existing contracts, winning new contracts, and we think that both Michigan and Massachusetts will be important contracts this year and obviously participating in new contracts into the next period of time. So we feel confident in our ability to step towards the overall target largely through taking share and maximizing our penetration in existing markets, but we will ride the openings as well, but we're not reliant on them.

Great. Thanks, Trevor. The next one is similar also is focused on that bridge, and I might put this one directly to you, Dylan. And it's from Liam Robertson at Jarden. So the interactive F29 bridge effectively brackets around USD 890 million at the low end of your pillar ranges and USD 1.14 billion at the high end. Can you help us understand what separates the two, specifically as the low-end achievable on things within your control? In other words, share gains in existing markets, digital penetration of contracts you already hold and your platforms initiatives, whereas the high end requires external developments to go your way, such as new state legislations and competitive RFP wins. Thanks, Liam. It's a very detailed question in the -- perhaps some answers in there. But I'll throw it to you, Dylan, to just share more on that.

Yes. Thanks, Liam. Probably a mixture of all those things. I think when we look at that $1 billion target today, and we take some kind of indicators within content out sort of like just below 4% share, but market that we know is going to grow to sort of like $12 billion in the U.S. First stage is to ensure that we can capture our fair share of that kind of like existing revenue and growth trend over the next 3 to 4 years. We believe now we've got the content road map, the executional scale to drive that share.

When we look at our social casino and our land-base share, obviously, way bigger than our interactive content share to date. So we have huge headroom to grow within those existing markets. As Trevor just said, when we can capture new market openings, like Alberta going online within this month, we will be there on day 1, and that will be the first time that Aristocrat branded content has been live in a new market opening on day 1. Flip over to iLottery, of course, we've -- we're scaling New Hampshire were due to launch Massachusetts and Michigan this month. And we'll see [indiscernible] those revenues kick in. There will be, obviously, new RFPs coming on board. So essentially, that range is based on the confidence that we have within our ability to execute within all the constructs that we just talked about within the presentation.

So our operational scale, our talent, our digital capabilities, we think that the $1 billion is there within our sites.

Great. Thanks, Dylan. And we might change momentum a little bit here and go to a question on AI that's come through for Bob. This is also an anonymous question. That was useful presentation from Bob, but only seem to focus on how AI was positive. And I'm just wondering whether Aristocrat is missing something here, you must surely have concerns about where AI agents could replicate content IP. Land base seems secure, but should we worry more about iGaming or social casino. Bob, over to you.

Yes. Thank you. So this is a good question. So when we think about sort of the specifics of the question, a successful game is not just an asset or a prototype, it requires a number of elements to be successful like the differentiators and the structural advantages that Trevor spoke about earlier. So we view AI as an enabler that will maintain and extend our strategic advantages because of the strategic -- because of the structural advantage that we have such as our brands and IP, our creative studios and talent, the long-term customer relationships that we have, the distribution networks and the deep regulatory expertise. So ultimately, we think that we need to have a good view on this, but AI will continue to strengthen our advantage because we can apply it to all the structural advantages that we have.

Great. Thanks, Bob. I'll come back to Vegas now. There's a question that's come through on Gaming Analytics. Okay? And this is from David Fabris at Macquarie. Can you walk through the thesis for the Gaming analytics acquisition? Will you be providing any suggestive initiatives to the operators to optimize their floors like allocation of casino-owned gains, first lease conversion suggestions? And secondly, will you be able to access anonymized player session data through gaming analytics? I was hoping to understand where there will be any benefits for game development. So I'll put that directly to you, Superna, if that's okay.

Sure. Okay. So gaming analytics allows our casino partners to make faster, smarter, more personalized decisions across marketing, player development, player slot operations and definitely floor optimization as well. That's 1 of the key thesis for it. The anonymized, very anonymized real-time insights adhere to the very, very robust data governance policies at Aristocrat. And so as we stitch together MTS Bit bus with gaming analytics, we believe that we have a very connected cross-channel offering that competitors would find -- we feel would find very difficult to replicate.

Okay. That's great. We've got a few financial-related questions that have also come through. So I might push these across to Sydney. Sally, the first one comes through from Adrian Lam at Citi. It was previously guided that the EBITDA margin in Interactive would fall somewhere between digital. I think that's referring to Pixel United, the old business. Product Madness today and gaming over the long term. Can you update where you see it getting to at the $1 billion revenue level? And should we expect much margin expansion over the next 1 to 2 years?

Thanks, James, and thanks, Adrian, for the question. When we made that Stephen, a couple of years ago, Pixel United included both Plarium and Big Fish, which we've since divested. The margin on the product madness was always the highest margin of the 3. So I think that stimulate itself is somewhat outdated. We do see opportunity for margin growth within Interactive -- but to manage expectations, we don't anticipate I'll get to the gaming level of margins, but we do expect growth over the next couple of years as we continue to scale our business.

Okay. That's great. Thank you, Sally. And while we are in Sydney, there's another question relating to financial matters, Sally. So I'll push this 1 to you again. And this comes through from Mark Wilson at RBC. And he's actually addressed the question to to Trevor, but I'll just put it directly to you. Do you still maintain the $100 million operating efficiency target?

The simple answer is yes, we do still maintain that $100 million efficiency target across FY '27. There's work underway managing the cost base is an ongoing focus of the organization. And I think as we said at the half, this is as much about ways of working, looking at process, eliminating was simplification, really trying to drive leverage out of the scale of the organization going forward. So in answer to your question, Mark, yes, the $100 million still holds as our FY '27 target.

Thanks, Sally. And there are a couple of questions that have come through on Product Madness. So we'll direct back to Las Vegas. And definitely, I'll ask these directly to you. And the first question comes through from Andre Frei, the UBS analyst. And I'll read it to you, why should investors believe that the social slot market will eventually return to growth. Otherwise, you depend on gaining share indefinitely. Dafne?

I would say a very interesting question. Thank you for the question. And I'm relatively new in learning as well, just completed about 120 days with the business. But one of the aspects that I've spent a lot of time learning what the team was, look, we have to focus on what we can control. And from what I've learned, we can really continue to grow in the industry and take share. We have a very robust model with product madness. We have been increasingly focus on the discipline that we have with UA, with engaging of our players and we've seen very positive results. I know that the industry has been becoming more complex and it is under pressure. And I think now there are other opportunities for us to continue to strengthen our position. I'm going to be focused on learning in various aspects of even increasing penetration in -- underpenetration -- underpenetrated markets such as EMEA. So I'm positive for the future, and I think we can continue to expand markets and take share.

Thanks, Dafne. I think we'll stay in Las Vegas and focus on Interactive because there are still a few other questions coming through on interactive. So I'll take Matt Ryan's question first here from Barrenjoey, and it's relating to iLottery. Dylan, when will we hear more about contract renewals in Virginia and North Carolina? Is a change to 100% Aristocrat ownership in the $1 billion revenue target?

Thanks for the question. Virginia is now out or react from an RFP point of view. So the responses for that are due in late September. North Carolina, we anticipate coming probably in the next like 12 to 18 months, obviously, a number of other jurisdictions are looking at iLottery legislation. So yes, within the numbers that we've shared, the scaling of New Hampshire, Michigan and Massachusetts are all part of the numbers that we've shared today.

And another question on interactive from Liam Robertson, which I'll cover now and given we're in Vegas content pricing. Your disclosed content take rate has narrowed from 18% to 18% of net revenue in 2024 to 8% to 12% now. What's behind that drop? And can you still charge a premium for flagship games online? Or is competition pushing rates down? Have you assumed a further degradation to take rates in your bridge to FY '29?

Again, thanks for the question. The difference between the numbers shown at the last Investor Day to now are just indicative of obviously the changing competitive market dynamics that we see in the U.S. Our premium land-based content does command a premium in the marketplace. And that's shown again in the numbers that we've put through today. The competitive nature of the iGaming landscape, has obviously changed over the last 18 months to 2 years as well. But again, going back to what I said in the presentation, we believe with our land-based social casino brands, franchises IP, now coming into the iGaming interactive space that we can take our fair share, both fair share of the growth expectations that we can see within the U.S. iGaming space.

And we'll go back to Sydney with a few this a question for Trevor, again, pre-submitted by an investor. Could Trevor provide some color on the competitive landscape and how things are changing with 1 large competitor being run by private equity and another now listed on the ASX. How would you -- and as part of that question, how would you characterize the current level of staff attrition?

Yes. Thanks for the question. shim,it's all related to gaming given the context of it, but I'll make some broader comments generally as a whole. We continue to see that at the end of the day, excuse me, content and technology differentiates companies in a pipeline of successful games, hardware and good execution is what differentiates. And if you look at the performance portfolio Aristocrat versus our competitors, it still continues to be the leading portfolio in the market. Yes, there are lots of moving parts from competitors in the market, but we also look at the whole market. And I think there are emerging competitors that continue to be making small headway, and we continue to focus on all competitors as far as competitiveness goes.

We haven't seen a significant amount of what I would consider different activity coming from our competitors and we feel that our competitive positions, particularly in the North American market, the Australian market, the Asian market in the gaming space are appropriate with a strong pipeline and good commercialization.

Talent does flow across this industry on a regular basis. We continue to be a net intake of talent from competitors. We are attracting more talent than we are losing and we're comfortable that both the culture and the high-performance nature of our organization, focused on customers, content, distribution and technology does make a difference and it makes it an attractive place for people in our industry that want to work in the industry.

Thanks, Trevor. And while we focused on gaming and in Sydney, a couple of other questions on gaming that have come in. These off from Andre Fromyhr at UBS. The first 1 relates to adjacencies. You'll recall, we quantified that average 16% share. His question is, why are you under indexing on market share in adjacent markets?

Yes. Thanks, Andre. I think, first of all, we have only entered some of those markets in more recent times. And if you actually look at our ship share that we have entered in places like Illinois BLT, Georgia Coram, we're actually indexing above that share. And the fact is we started with a 0 installed base and continue to build that, and that will take us time to do that. We still -- we're very confident in both product options, the commercial options and the hardware to actually make and continue to take share. So I'd expect to see the overall adjacency shares from that 6% to 8% track towards more traditional share. It's just that we've only been in these markets, in some cases, a couple of years.

In other cases, we've been there slightly longer, and these are new markets. So the progress could be better. I acknowledge that, but I also see what we're shipping on an annual basis and believe that we're shipping well ahead of our ship share.

And there's another question from Andre relating to gaming. So thanks for all the questions, Andre. I appreciate it. And this -- I'll put to you again, Trevor. How do you get the balance right between growing volume. In other words, your ops in stores and yield/pricing. Is there a time in the cycle where building the installed base is more important?

Thanks, Andre. We look at gaming operations is growing gaming operations revenue. So we continue to target above GGR growth in gaming operations. And we think that will be done through both yield and through installed base. Whilst you've got a portfolio of strong games like we have at the moment, we continue to see our installed base growing strongly. And we have reiterated today that we'll be at the top end of the 4,000 to 5,000 units on an endpoint in the FY '26 period, and we have confidence around that given the performance of the games and the visibility of our pipeline. There are times where there is yield and some of those changes come in, particularly in, say, MSP when we're doing more MSP or in Class 2, which is not as high a yield perspective, and this is really around portfolio choices around what are the segments we're choosing to compete and challenge in a period of time.

So it's not a case of 1 or the other. From our perspective, we look at growing our gaming operations revenue on an annual basis, and we'll continue to grow at above the GGR and continue to provide great solutions to our operators, whether it's in Class II or Class III compelling product, whether it's licensed brand proprietary brands, hardware we feel very comfortable in our ability to grow GGR but grow gaming ops revenue above GGR future.

Thanks, Trevor. And I'll stick with gaming while you've got the mic, so to speak, Kai Erman from Jefferies. He's asked a couple of questions here, so I'll just cover the gaming 1 first. Trevor, you mentioned plans to capture more market share in destination-driven markets like Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Are you targeting anything specific for this other than leveraging the market-leading content that you have? Your content has been market-leading for some time. So what do you think will change the market share dynamic in those markets?

Yes. Thanks, Kai. You're absolutely right. The content is market-leading. I guess what we would say, particularly in the Las Vegas environment is there are a number of new properties which are opening up or have opened up to Las Vegas stripping as we referenced, where new properties open, we tend to have a higher share of those properties that we have from an organic or installed base point of view. So with properties opening, we see an opportunity to get a better share from day 1 as opposed to converting or churning floors. So that's part of why we believe that will happen.

As I said, it's a small percentage of our business. The majority of our business is actually regional casinos, both tribal and commercial, and we continue to have very strong shares there and see opportunity to grow in those markets as well.

Good. I think we'll come back to Vegas because there are a lot of questions on interactive and there's some detailed ones that I think are relevant to cover here. So Dylan will come back to you. The first couple are from Sam Bradshaw, the Evenson Partners analyst. Thanks for the question, Sam. So firstly, you mentioned that you have further opportunities to leverage existing brands in iLottery. But on Slide 14, none of those key land-based franchises have iLottery on the road map. And this is referencing Trevor's strategy slide on our brand families. Wondering if you can clarify this.

Yes. So thanks, Sam. We're just in the process of obviously putting together the road map for lottery that extends into fiscal year '20, calendar year '27. We've obviously started by coming upstream into the content space, making sure that we've got the right road map to execute against our strategic initiatives, growth ambition for content and that will now start to flow through into iLottery. So we'll share more details on that as the road map is confirmed.

Great. And there's another 1 also from Sam. So I'll ask that as well. Just wondering if you can give some context around the recent Colorado RFP that was won by Pollard and the Virginia RFP that is open to tender. I think you made a comment on that already, so perhaps just focus on Colorado.

Yes. So obviously, I'm disappointed to not win the Colorado, when you actually look at the scoring, we lost it by a very, very small margin. We're obviously very confident coming off the back of winning New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Michigan and also executing against the contractual delivery dates of Massachusetts and Michigan with both launching in July. We're confident as we move forward in our execution capability in our teams and also in a very strong innovation pipeline that we have for our iLottery digital capabilities, our products, our platform and also, as I just mentioned, bringing the Aristocrat branded content online as well. So where -- yes, we're very, very confident as we move forward, look at RFP, as I said earlier, Virginia is now back out responses due by end of September.

Okay. Good. And another question relating to iLottery that's come through from David Fabris at Macquarie. With iLottery, I know Pennsylvania is not your license, but it has struggled in recent years when we look at monthly data. And 1 of the attributing factors is negative growth given competition from other online products like iGaming and sports betting. Should we think about this as a precedent into other lottery states? Or is it Pennsylvania unique?

Great question.

Obviously, there's nuances, unique dynamics in every -- in every state. We've seen definitely a slowdown within Michigan, as obviously their players compete in a broader ecosystem like Pennsylvania. But again, with Michigan transferring now over into a full Aristocrat interactive stack, we believe that there is headroom for growth within that state. Again, as we bring new product capabilities, stronger innovation, both from the product player engagement side, also from the content side to bear for players within that market. And also expecting Massachusetts, obviously, to be a strong contributor of growth within the Aristocrat iLottery ecosystem as well. So we have different nuances and dynamics, but I think we're very confident in our ability to grow share, grow penetration in the markets where Aristocrat Interactive is running our lottery contracts.

Thanks, Dylan. There are a few more financial-related questions on operating leverage and margins. So I'll put these to Sally, if we can go back to Sydney for a couple and these have come through from investors. The first 1 is from Matt Williams at early Funds Management. Operating leverage in Aristocrat Gaming from financial '22 to first half '26 has been relatively anemic given the growth in gaming ops. Will we ever see operating leverage in this most important division. Sally?

Thanks for the question, Mark. The answer is, yes, we are looking at operating leverage across all of our business. So the 3 segments, D&D and corporate costs. I think we do have to acknowledge that gaming has very healthy margins. So our opportunity in gaming is not as big as our opportunity in, say, Interactive. But yes, we are looking to drive operating leverage across the whole organization.

And Sally, a related question, which is a little bit more specific. So I'd like to ask if it comes from Philip Wensley at Paradise. And it covers some of the issues that have been in the previous questions. So I'll just get to the crux of what he's asking here. At what point should investors expect investments to translate into margin expansion, specifically for Interactive? Should we expect operating leverage to become more visible before the financial year '29 revenue target is achieved? Or is that largely a post-scale story?

I think the answer is yes. We're not going to wait until FY '29 to try and drive the leverage. We want to grow, but we want to grow at the right rate, focus on driving the scale, but keep a focus on the returns. So yes, if you didn't see any operating leverage out of interactive until FY '29, I think we would be disappointed internally as well. That's not how we operate. We operate constantly trying to manage an effective cost base to support the ongoing growth and diversification of the portfolio.

Great. Okay. That's good. We've got a number of questions that are relating to other parts of the business. So I'll come back to Dafne in Vegas for this one. And -- this comes from -- this is a pre-submitted question from an investor. What are you doing to incentivize direct-to-consumer migration? And is there a cap to the percentage of bookings that could ultimately be transitioned to direct-to-consumer in Product Madness?

That's a good question, especially after some of the numbers that I shared. So to part 1, we're doing quite a few things to incentivize migration. So we offer a series of unique deals. We have a strong value proposition that helps players coming in into D2C. And for us, it's really all about us creating that seamless player experience. So we are looking to have, I would say, a healthy mix. So if I look through the second part of the question, it is it is a question about setting a goal and a target for that percentage. And we are now at 24%. It is a healthy number, and we continue to see that number growing, and we're going to be monitoring that very close. So we do not have a specific number, but we wanted to learn and make sure that, that balance of D2C and in-app is a good balance for us because in the end, it's really all about maximizing the portfolio is about maximizing the player experience and the profitability and growth that we have.

Thanks, Dafne, and we'll stay in Vegas a question from Ron Sundram at MST, and I'll put this 1 to Superna. How is a wage investment and repositioning progressing? And what are your long-term market share expectations for a wage in the U.S. online.

Thanks for the question. So Awager is something we're very, very excited about. We're confident in the growth trajectory of Awager throughout North America. The casino and casino experience is just a fantastic marketing vehicle for customers, for operators, where people can interact with the physical machines on the floor in real time on their mobile phones. And in New Jersey, they can actually interact and enjoy that experience with the sites and the sounds of the real casino floor with a real machine, is proving to be something that we're very, very confident in, customers have been very excited about the product as well. And as we continue to expand, customers seem to really take to the offerings.

Okay. Thanks. Right. I think we've covered most of the Interactive questions. There's 1 more on the Interactive revenue target, Dylan, we might just cover here, and it's again from David Fabris at Macquarie. Within the $1 billion interactive revenue target, my understanding was that the original guidance was scaling to your fair share in those markets that are legally opened with new markets providing upside. It now looks like the guidance includes expectations of new market openings. Can you please clarify?

Yes, great question. Inside the indicative numbers that we've shared, Obviously, there are regulated markets today where we are not live that are already open that we want to be. If you take places through kind of Europe, places like Philippines, South Africa, even in Latin America. Our aggregation business is in some of those markets today, but the Aristocrat branded content isn't. So we have included in that indicative view, I guess, a rollout into more regulated markets. We focus first on I guess, fixing the distribution gaps that we had in the U.S., as Trevor shared earlier, now have virtually sort of full penetration within the U.S. marketplace and then starting to move into new markets on day 1, Alberta, as I said, a great example. So yes, there are regulated markets that are already open, that are part of our strategic growth plan moving forward.

Okay. That's great, Dylan. And while we've got you there, we've got another question here. You noted on 2 different slides that you intend to take Dragon Link and Spooky link to iGaming. Could you comment on the timing and discuss the factors that you take into account and how you time launches of these land-based franchises?

Yes, great question. The team have been obviously working very, very hard to build a very compelling road map that really starts to bring all those great brands, well-known brands, will love brands that already exist in the land-based and social world, Dragolink and Spooklink are great examples of that. They are on our road map. We're discussing, obviously, launches with our operating partners at the moment. And we look at a number of factors, whether that's big kind of like seasonal events to put certain content behind to drive additional supply player engagement. But we are absolutely now in tune with our key operating partners working on the best time to launch some of our key brands and franchises, but not just as a single game. As we said in the presentation, that kind of like one-to-many strategy that allows us to build close derivatives even after seasonal events like Christmas with some of our core brands and our core games. You'll see a lot more of that coming on the Aristocrat road map during our fiscal year '27.

Great. And a related question, Dylan, while we're on the land-based brands coming through to iGaming. So the question from James Fuller at QVG Capital. What market share in USI gaming for Lightning Link would validate the time effort and investment in the scope. I think it's a very specific question. We wouldn't normally quantify a specific market share, but perhaps you could just talk more broadly about how success looks with Lightning Link.

Yes. No, look, it's a great question. Lightner Link is due to launch this month. I think when you see the appetite the operators, and players ultimately have for this brand. I think that's a very strong leading indicator that we expect this to be a very strong success within iGaming. It has been for a while, 1 of the most anticipated launches within iGaming. And for us, it's the start of not just Lightning Link, but bringing more of the Link family to our operators and players. And we know that, that brand has had residents for 10 years with the launch of Lightning 10 years within Gaming recently. We know it's 1 of the top-performing games within so or apps within social casino and we expect that to like same resonance to come to players in the game and digital ecosystem.

Great. Thanks, Dylan. I think we've covered most of the interactive questions. So we might give you a pause there. And go back to Sydney because there are a few questions that I'll put to both Trevor and Sally. In fact, Sally, this one is for you that's just come through. Sally, why has Aristocrat been so light on the buyback since the result you were doing close to 20% of volumes before the 31st of March close. Sally, do you want to make a comment on the buyback there, please?

Yes. Look, there's a couple of things. When we do buybacks, we are constantly monitoring the volume, our ability to be in market -- and given the share price movement over the last month, that has caused us to be out of the market out of a few occasions because of the VA et -- we were in yesterday, we're in today. We continue to see buybacks as a key element of our capital allocation. And we are committed to the program but we do work within certain boundaries as to how we can execute on a day to diverses. We can still believe there's value, and so we will continue executing on buybacks at a pace as appropriate based on all of those other considerations that we have to take into play.

Thanks, Sally. And we've covered a lot of ground in the questions. So if there are any more that any analysts who want to lodge or investors want to lodge, please go ahead. We've probably got 2 or 3 -- 2 or 3 left. I think we've done well. We said we would do around 45 minutes of Q&A, and we're approaching that point. So we won't -- we'll be finishing well before 12:00, so we can give some time back to you in your day. A couple of high-level questions, actually 1 high-level 1 detail for you, Trevor. Firstly, we saw Phoenix Link launch in New South Wales mentioned on 1 of your slides. What are the plans for Phoenix Link in other states in Australia?

Yes. Thanks for the question. Yes, we are very excited by Phoenix Link launching this quarter in New South Wales. So great opportunity for that product to be brought to the Australian marketplace. There are some regulatory requirements that doesn't allow games to necessarily be distributed across all markets. We're continuing to work through those. We do have a plan to release Phoenix Link in other states later in the year -- later next year.

Thanks, Trevor. And 1 other high-level question that has come through. What is Aristocrat's view on the threat from prediction markets?

Yes. Thanks for that question. First of all, I mean, we stand with the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the AGA, the AGM and our tribal and state regulators -- and we believe that the current prediction markets where sports betting is enabled through the production markets is gambling, and therefore, it is illegal or should be regulated and legislated -- regulated and taxed at a state level. We continue to see opportunity for us to work with both our customers, our regulators to provide great solutions for on-premise consumption and also, as Dylan has talked about, the iGaming solutions, which will be out there in the marketplace. We haven't seen any impact in our business at this point in time. It does largely relate to sports contracts. And I would argue that a lot of that sports contract is new revenue to the sector as opposed to necessarily moving revenue from the traditional land-based customers or online customers. .

Okay. That's great. We've got one last question, and then I'll hand over to Trevor to make some closing remarks. And this comes from Liam Robertson at Jordan. And the question seems to have disappeared, but I'll ask it anyway. It was a question about acquisitions. And I'll put it to Sally. How is your position on acquisitions changed just given the large cash balance?

It doesn't change our position on acquisitions. They are part of our capital allocation framework. And obviously, our focus is on organic growth. We do look at other opportunities and things that we feel would fit within our strategy and what we need to do. And then obviously, any excess cash we look to return to shareholders through the buybacks and the dividends. I think just because we're sat on cash, doesn't mean to say that we have a higher appetite for M&A. We're going to do what sits with us and what sits with our strategy, and that's not driven by any balance that we have around cash or our capability. I think we focus on making sure we've got the flexibility to do what we need, but it doesn't mean that we're going to do it just because we can.

Thanks, Sally. And I think we'll call it to a close there. And I'll hand back to Trevor to make some closing remarks. Thanks, everyone, for the questions.

Yes. Thanks for the question and thanks for the interest in Aristocrat. I'll just come back to the key messages that we were talking to you about today, which is really about scale positions and opportunities and we see ourselves having large addressable markets, strong positions in those markets, but also adjacencies in new markets like iLottery and content being great opportunities for growth for our company in the future. We've obviously got a proven track record of delivering that, and that comes from having a strong product and technology organization that is focused on innovating. But at the same time, multichannel distribution, as you can see, we're now talking about taking games across our organization and across our various channels.

Strong track record of execution, as I mentioned, with the real focus on the recurring revenue sector and our ability to continue to expand our growth in recurring revenue and our focus on operational metrics, such as generating operating leverage, cost out program that we're focused on as a company as a whole, and these really support the strategic priorities or strategic advantage that we spoke to at the start of the presentation around leading brand content and IP, content studios and talent that differentiate us, the multichannel distribution deep regulatory experience and capability and then the long-standing customer partnerships.

So we thank you for your time and your interest in Aristocrat. We have -- we appreciate your interest and your questions, and we thank you for joining us today. So thanks to everyone involved thanks to presenters, and thanks for those that ask questions on the line. And if there's any further questions, James [indiscernible] from the IR team will certainly be open to responding to you. But thanks again for your time, and we appreciate your interest in Aristocrat.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aristocrat Half year 2026 Results Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's call is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to James Coghill, General Manager, Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining Aristocrat's Half Year 2026 Results Presentation. I'm James Coghill, General Manager, Investor Relations. I'm joined by Trevor Croker, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director; and Sally Denby, Chief Financial Officer.

Trevor will start by covering some key highlights from the first half and in each of our businesses. He will then discuss strategic progress and how we are strengthening Aristocrat's foundations through AI deployment. Sally will then take you through the group's financial results and balance sheet in more detail and discuss our outlook. This will be followed by a Q&A session.

Unless otherwise stated, all figures are presented in reported currency. Please note the usual disclaimer at the back of the presentation.

With that, I will now hand over to Trevor.

Thanks, James, and good morning, everyone. The first half of FY '26 was another period of clear progress for Aristocrat. We delivered a strong first half performance, gaining market share across all key segments and setting us up well to deliver on our full year commitments and to continue to grow into the future.

Our focus on active and disciplined capital management continued in the half including accelerating our on-market share buyback program. And this morning, we announced a further $1 billion increase to the current program and extensions through the 12th of May 2027. We also continue to deploy our capital to support future growth, making several targeted strategic investments that support Aristocrat's long-term growth and resilience and improve our ability to service the evolving needs of customers and players.

In interactive, momentum is building. The executive leadership change last year and the recent addition of high-caliber talent has positioned us well to deliver on many growth opportunities, and I'm highly encouraged by the recent progress.

While there is still work to be done, we remain focused on delivering our FY '29 USD 1 billion interactive revenue target. We look forward to sharing more details about Interactive at our investor briefing on July 1.

Across the group, we remain focused on delivering operating leverage and scale benefits by focusing on efficiency and operating as One Aristocrat. To this end, we expect to realize $100 million in annualized savings during FY '27, while continuing to invest in growth.

Finally, our ongoing focus on embracing AI as a positive force for change across the company accelerated over the period, strengthening our foundations, enhancing our strategic advantages and opening up new opportunities with our customers.

Slide 3 highlights our underlying results for the period in constant currency. Aristocrat delivered a strong half year result, achieving 19% EPSA growth driven by continued operational execution. This reflects strong underlying constant currency revenue growth across all 3 of our businesses with over 70% recurring revenue across the group. We also achieved profit margin expansion at the group level, leading to 16% NPATA growth or 8% in reported currency.

During the period, we capitalized on market conditions, buying back almost $680 million of shares, and we retain significant capacity to continue returning capital to shareholders in the second half.

Overall, we're pleased with our first half performance, particularly as several key product launches fall in the second half.

Looking ahead, we see strong momentum in the business and expect to deliver NPATA growth for the full year to 30 September 2026 on a constant currency basis.

Let me provide some highlights of our divisional performance. Strong revenue growth across the group, combined with continued cost discipline and gains from our successful IP defense led to a group EBITDA margin uplift to 220 basis points.

In gaming, we achieved market share gains in all key regions with exceptional performances in outright sales in North America and ANZ. Gaming operations saw continued gains led by Buffalo Mega Stampede and our pipeline remains robust with high levels of customer interest and strong early performance and recently launched premium games such as Monopoly Big Board bucks, Spooky Link Grand and Lightning 10-year Storm. Margin remained strong with a small reduction reflecting product mix given the exceptional outright sales performance.

Product Madness delivered an impressive performance with continued share gains and profit margin expansion reflecting focused investment in user acquisition, high-performing content and effective execution of our direct-to-consumer strategy.

In Interactive, iLottery and content delivered strong growth partially offset by platforms, which was impacted by our decision to exit the White Label business in the year. Excluding this, revenue growth was 11%.

Turning to an update on strategy. Our long-term strategy remains focused on delivering sustainable growth and superior shareholder returns. Over the past 6 months, we've made meaningful progress strengthening our competitive position by continuing to invest in content and capabilities that will expand our global footprint, deepen customer engagement and underpin long-term value creation. Our content is recognized as the best in the industry. We are building on that strength through our global studio model, enabling an enterprise-wide approach to game development and accelerating distribution across channels and markets. We remain focused on improving our speed to market across platforms, to enhance monetization as evidenced by our second half plans to launch Lightning Link in Interactive as well as additional high-performing land-based games.

At the same time, we are focused on expanding in underpenetrated markets with a particular focus on North American adjacencies, EMEA and the opening of the UAE in 2027. Our platform strategy represents a critical enabler of future growth, presenting new distribution opportunities as well as integrating advanced analytics, mobile connectivity and real-time player engagement capabilities. These strategic technology investments will allow us to deliver more personalized data-driven experiences to customers and players alike.

Our recent acquisition of AAG provides a new platform through which to distribute our content. We also acquired Gaming Analytics earlier this year, a provider of AI-powered tools for real-time player analytics, slot optimization and marketing automation designed to operate on top of traditional casino management systems.

As we grow, we expect to benefit from our One Aristocrat operating model, which drives greater alignment, scalability and decision-making effectiveness across the group, ultimately enhancing operating leverage and improving profitability. Aligned with our operating model is a deep commitment to sustainability and compliance necessary to support a vibrant industry. Meanwhile, our financial strength provides flexibility to execute our strategy through diverse environments.

Further supporting our strategy are investments in organizational talent and AI. Over the reporting period, we've continued to lift capability and drive change across Aristocrat in response to evolving strategic needs and opportunities. In February, we announced the appointment of Bob Serr, Chief Technology Officer; and Dafne Guisard, Chief Operating Officer, EMEA, to the executive leadership team. Bob previously held senior roles at Microsoft, Amazon and DoubleDown Interactive. He brings deep expertise in AI, emerging technologies and delivery of enterprise-level innovation, helping us to significantly accelerate our technology agenda and AI implementation. Dafne was most recently COO at Entain and has decades of commercial and operational leadership experience across multiple global consumer industries. She brings dedicated focus to our growth strategy in EMEA and AI implementation experience. At the same time, we've consolidated marketing as a global function under the leadership of Barry French to optimize impact and efficiency across our branded portfolio aligned with our One Aristocrat strategy.

As previously announced, we also appointed Dylan Slaney, the CEO of Aristocrat Interactive. Dylan is a proven iGaming executive with over 10 years of global leadership experience in the sector and a track record of driving operational excellence and a customer-first approach that delivers transformative growth. We continue to focus on developing and recruiting leadership capability with diverse experience to support the delivery of our strategic objectives.

In summary, we believe our strategy and scale positions us well to deliver on our ambition to continue to gain market share across the business and our USD 1 billion Interactive revenue target. Combined with our disciplined approach to managing costs across the group, we are well placed to deliver margin expansion and ultimately, long-term shareholder value.

While the macro environment remains volatile, historical trends demonstrate that gaming is resilient during periods of economic uncertainty. This pattern is evident in current performance with North American GGR growth in the first half remaining stable overall. Some softness has been observed in destination markets, which are typically more sensitive to discretionary travel and high-end spending. However, these represent around 5% of our North American revenues and have been more than offset by steady performance in regional markets which benefit from a more consistent local player base. At the same time, operators continue to express a positive outlook with capital expenditure plans remaining intact, signaling confidence in the sector's medium-term growth trajectory. This resilience is further reinforced by Aristocrat's diversified product portfolio that allows us to serve players wherever they choose to play. We operate at over 65% of regulated gaming markets across North America, but we have market-leading positions, including exposure to several of the industry's fastest-growing segments.

Notably, we have a higher weighting towards regional and tribal markets, which historically demonstrate greater stability when destination markets face pressure. In addition, our digital businesses across both lottery and product madness provide complementary growth with revenues largely driven by microtransactions. These digital revenue streams tend to outperform during periods when broader consumer spending is constrained.

Our confidence in Aristocrat sustained growth and consistent strategic execution stems from a set of unique differentiators that form a powerful ecosystem providing resilience across business cycles. These strategic advantages have enabled the group to navigate challenges from COVID to geopolitical volatility while continuing to outperform and strengthen our market positions.

At the core is our market-leading portfolio of content brands and proprietary IP, built through disciplined and sustained investment in design and development. Our deep library of proven game mechanics and iconic titles have driven consistent market share gains over time. This strategic advantage is reinforced by a globally integrated network of creative studios and world-class talent. Further, Aristocrat is able to truly leverage its content and IP across multiple established distribution channels, enabling us to service a wide range of land-based and digital operators, consumers and governments. Ongoing technology investments to streamline cross-channel porting will strengthen this edge further supporting our scale and long-term customer partnerships.

Aristocrat's deep regulatory expertise also represents a critical advantage. We operate in highly regulated markets, maintaining over 350 licenses globally a substantial pillar of the ecosystem that limits disruption. Further, our proven compliance capabilities, governance standards and most of all, the trust of regulators, customers and players built up over decades as a meaningful differentiator and reinforces the company's social license to operate. This trust has forged long-standing customer partnerships, which are amplified by our scale commercialization capabilities and global sales and distribution network, resulting in superior customer service and consistent share gains across markets. This is further supported by global scale product delivery capabilities and an extensive network of local service technicians. Sustainability and responsible gameplay underpin all these benefits, a strong focus on governance, empowering safer play and community impact enhances resilience and reputation.

Looking ahead, AI deployment represents a significant opportunity to further strengthen each of these differentiators, positioning Aristocrat to compete from an even stronger vantage point. AI implementation is rapidly becoming the expected standard across the technology and gaming sectors. Aristocrat's advantage lies in how we apply AI to enhance our core strengths and evolve to drive compounding returns across the business.

While we see benefits throughout the organization, we are focused on 3 key areas: first, enhancing creativity. AI is significantly improving the productivity of our creative and engineering teams through improvements in process, faster prototyping and creation of base level artwork and animations. Our studios are able to test consumer insights and ad packages almost in real time. This is building capacity to focus on high-value concept development and innovation. Importantly, our differentiation remains grounded on improving game mechanics, creative instinct, deep player understanding and exceptional commercialization capabilities. capabilities AI cannot replicate easily.

The impact is already evident where, for example, of Product Madness, we've more than doubled creative productivity, enhancing live ops development and personalization without head count growth.

Second, we're improving velocity to market. AI is reducing time spent across prototyping, testing, quality assurance and cross-channel porting. This is enabling faster product delivery and increased output across jurisdictions. Some examples are our code conversion platform, which has reduced conversion from 16 weeks to 1 week and regulatory automation, which has cut product preparation time in certain processes from 8 weeks to 3 weeks.

Third, advancing AI-powered insights and optimization, we are leveraging extensive data sets across land-based and digital to drive growth and enhance player experiences. For instance, Gaming Analytics is a customer-focused AI business delivering real-time reporting and insights to support decision-making to operators, strengthening our long-term partnerships. We expect to see further benefits across the group as we integrate these differentiated capabilities. AI is becoming a core capability, enhancing performance today and improving enterprise process into the future, which ultimately benefits both our top line and profitability.

I'll now hand over to Sally, who will take us through a summary of the group results and outlook.

Thanks, Trevor, and good morning, everyone. I'm starting on Slide 10, our group results summary. Aristocrat delivered NPATA of close to $800 million over the half, an increase of 8% by 16% in constant currency. Revenues and segment profits increased by 6% and 7% in constant currency, respectively.

While operational performance was the key driver of our NPATA growth, I would like to call out some other items seen on the P&L. D&D expense increased 7% on a constant currency basis in line with our mid-single-digit full year guidance as we continue to invest in content and technology to enable future growth, including increased investment related to recent acquisitions.

Corporate costs benefited from a $45 million legal cost recovery relating to the Light & Wonder settlement as well as ongoing cost discipline and other benefits.

Net interest expense benefited from lower average debt balances partially offset by lower interest income, mainly due to the buyback and the effective tax rate was 27%, in line with our annual guidance.

EPSA increased close to 11% or 19% in constant currency, reflecting the solid operational performance and accretion from our share buyback program.

Finally, the directors have authorized a new franked interim dividend of $0.50 per share for the half year ended 31st of March 2026, representing a payout ratio of 38.8%.

Turning to our profit reconciliation. The uplift in NPATA compared to first half '25, mainly reflects the strong operating performance in gaming as well as product madness, partially offset by Interactive which was impacted by the reclass of D&D expenses noted at our full year results and the investments in recent acquisitions noted at the AGM. Improved corporate costs was driven by the legal cost recovery and the strengthening Australian dollar was a key detractor.

Turning to further detail on our divisional operations. Gaming delivered strong growth with revenue increasing 12% and profit up 10% in constant currency. This performance was driven by exceptional execution and share gains in North American and Australian outright sales alongside continued momentum in gaming operations. Growth was underpinned by strong demand for the Baron cabinet across all regions, supported by our industry-leading content. In North America, performance was led by an outstanding outright sales contribution. Unit sales increased 15%. Average selling prices rose 6% and ship share reached 31%, up 260 basis points year-over-year. This was driven by a sustained demand for Spooky Link on The Baron Portrait cabinet. Adjacencies also performed well, supported by an ongoing expansion in Georgia COAM.

Gaming operations added over 2,000 units during the half, increasing market share to over 43% up 70 basis points sequentially, with Buffalo Mega Stampede, Dragon Link and Phoenix Link being the main driver. Fee per day remained stable during the half with sequential improvement expected in the second half, supported by the strong product pipeline, including Lightning 10-year Storm, Spooky Link Grand and Monopoly Big Board Bucks. We remain confident in our ability to add 4,000 to 5,000 net units for the full year and now expect net unit growth at the upper end of this range. The modest decline in North America margin reflects the higher mix of outright sales in the period.

In the Rest of the World segment, performance was supported by a sustained recovery in Australia. Strong demand for the Baron Upright and key titles such as Fabulous, Hidden Spin Jackpots, Heaven and Earth, Jackpot Reels and Cash-on-Reels drove ship share to approximately 48% for the half. The Baron Portrait cabinet with compelling content is scheduled to launch in Australia in the second half, exclusively on the hybrid model with strong customer interest. Softer performance outside ANZ primarily reflects timing with the Baron rollout plan for the second half. Product Madness delivered another strong half with social casino revenue increasing 5% in a market that declined 11%, resulting in share gains of 240 basis points. Growth was driven by continued investment in content, player-first innovation, live operations and features, further enhanced by increased use of AI. User acquisition investment increased from 18% to 20% of revenue with targeted investment to support bookings growth and share gains. Margins expanded by 240 basis points primarily reflecting the exit of the lower-margin Big Fish business and the continued migration to direct-to-consumer channel, partially offset by higher user acquisition investments. Digital penetration reached 24% of social casino revenue. Excluding Big Fish, margins increased by 100 basis points to 46.7%.

Interactive delivered strong performance in our iLottery and content, partially offset by platforms, which was impacted by the previously announced exit from the White Label business. Total revenue included in our iLottery JV increased 7%. Margins declined 530 basis points year-over-year, impacted by acquisition-related investments and the reclassification of technology operation costs from D&D expenses into Interactive. Adjusting to these factors, margins would have increased by 280 basis points. iLottery grew 14%, including the JV, driven by continued strong performances in North Carolina and Virginia. Focus remains on the upcoming Massachusetts launch in July, the largest U.S. retail lottery on a per capita basis and the third largest globally. Michigan will also transition to an exclusive interactive contract in July.

Content revenue increased 25%, supported by expanded market access and new launches with major operators. The business is now live in 6 of 7 U.S. regulated iGaming states with Rhode Island expected to launch in the second half. Market share increased 190 basis points to 3.7%, driven by strong performance from land-based franchises such as [indiscernible] and [indiscernible]. The launch of Lightning Link in July is expected to be a key growth catalyst.

As noted at the AGM this year, content growth has been slower than expected, with foundational technology investments largely complete and new leadership in place performance is expected to improve. Platforms performance reflects the exit of the low-margin white label business. Excluding white label, revenue was broadly flat, with stable casino systems performance and continued traction with the PAM platform. White label revenues contributed net USD 36 million in FY '25, with the exit expected to be complete in the second half of the year. We continue to make encouraging progress in Interactive and have full confidence in our plans. We intend to unpack Interactive during our July 1 investor briefing and plan to provide further details on the pathway to $1 billion as well as our recent investments.

Moving to Slide 15. Operating cash flow generation remains strong, reflecting continued operating momentum, partially offset by FX. Acquisitions and divestments reflect the acquisition of Awager, a new digital distribution channel for our land-based content and Gaming Analytics. I will touch on CapEx and shareholder returns over the next 2 slides. Aristocrat allocates capital to support our long-term growth strategy and optimize shareholder returns. We prioritized consistent investment in D&D, CapEx and UA to drive organic growth, alongside a disciplined approach to strategic M&A. We remain committed and focused on returning excess capital to shareholders via on-market share buybacks and dividends.

Last month, Aristocrat announced the refinancing of its debt facilities. The new facilities were issued at attractive rates, reflecting our investment-grade credit profile. The USD 1 billion revolving credit facility in the new structure significantly enhances our flexibility to manage capital while continuing to invest in long-term growth. During the half, Aristocrat returned almost $680 million to shareholders through on-market share buybacks. And today, we announced a $1 billion increase in extension to our existing program, taking the total authorization to $2.5 billion, of which we have executed almost $1.3 billion today. The program runs through to May 2027.

In total, $981 million were returned to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends over the half, with $5.1 billion returned over the last 5 years, all whilst investing for growth. We remain committed to returning capital to shareholders to optimize total shareholder returns.

Investments in organic growth remain pivotal to drive long-term revenue and share gains. Total organic investment is generally tracked around 24% to 27% of group revenues with flexibility to adjust in response to business needs and opportunities.

CapEx largely reflects expansion of our gaming operations installed base, a high-return investment. This fluctuates based on variances in gross installs. As previously discussed, U.S. spend increased to support business momentum while maintaining a clear focus on efficiency and return on marketing investments.

D&D expense remains our single most important driver of long-term growth. As previously noted, D&D is now reported across 2 discrete categories: products and technology rather than by division. This is aligned with our One Aristocrat strategy, whereby D&D is now being coordinated to ensure better strategic alignment and content leverage across the entire group. During the half, Aristocrat invested $407 million in D&D, representing a 7% increase over the PCP on a constant currency basis, in line with our full year mid-single-digit growth guidance. We remain in an investment cycle as we continue to position the business for future opportunities.

In interactive, this includes technology and product investment in iLottery with Michigan and Massachusetts going live in July. Investment in distribution and capabilities included Awager and Gaming Analytics. These businesses are currently early-phase start-ups, which require investments to scale and extend our product offerings strengthening our customer partnerships and service capabilities. Turning to operating leverage. Margin expansion remains a focus as we continue to scale the business. Aristocrat delivered consistent improvement in both segment profit and EBITDA margins over time across the portfolio, reflecting the strength of our operating model scale benefit and a focus on efficiency.

As the business grows and we implement our One Aristocrat operating model and deploy AI, we see continued opportunities to proactively manage costs across the group. Our ongoing cost optimization efforts are expected to achieve approximately $100 million of savings during FY '27. Disciplined cost management combined with strong operating cash flow continues to create capacity for strategic reinvestment across the business.

Turning to our outlook on Slide 19. Aristocrat continues to expect to deliver NPATA growth over the full year to 30 September 2026 on a constant currency basis. Noting that in gaming, we now expect net unit growth at the upper end of the 4,000 to 5,000 unit target range in gaming operations with no other material change to our other divisional comments on modeling inputs. We look forward to providing greater detail on our strategy and opportunities at our investor briefing on the 1st of July. Overall, we are pleased with our first half results and confident in the momentum we see for the second half.

I will now hand back to the moderator to start the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Matt Ryan from Barrenjoey.

I just had a question on the full year guidance. I think previously, you were talking about a second half performance skew, which doesn't appear to be sort of called out anymore. So just interested if you could give some color on whether you're assuming, I guess, more of a 50-50 weighting now. And then just digging into that, we'd expect that gaming ops and Interactive have a stronger second half. So if you could just comment on what sort of offsets within the divisions or corporate costs might work against you in the second half?

Yes. Thanks, Matt. I appreciate the question. Certainly, when you look at the momentum in the gaming business with Lightning Link 10 Year and Buffalo Mega continuing to perform in the back half of the -- back part of the first half and then the launch of Spooky Link Grand and also Monopoly big board bucks. Certainly, the pipeline and the performance of those games is very pleasing for us. But so we see that running into the second half. Likewise, in the ANZ business, our portfolio games. We showed a strong portfolio games at AGE in March and the performance to date in the market of Cashman and other new games give us confidence around the release of those products into the second half of the ANZ business. And we are at the G2E Asia today, launching Baron and new content into the Asian market, which we see running in for a strong second half for the gaming business. On an Interactive, the key story in Interactive is the pending launch of Lightning Link, which is on track for launch in July this year. So Lightning Link in the Interactive business going live in North America. And then the scaling of the opening of the Massachusetts and the Michigan lotteries are scaling through those in the second half of -- the second half, so the last quarter of the year. So overall, our confidence around the second half skew comes from the operational momentum we're carrying into the half, and we can see strong pipelines and good performance behind the products that are driving that as well.

Great. Anything working against you in the second half? And just any comments on corporate costs?

Yes. Obviously, the corporate costs benefited from a legal settlement in the first half. As you're aware, Matt, we always see some fares in the cross corporate cost between the half. We think without the litigation costs from forward, our win rate is approximately $150 million. So you can expect second $75 million for the half would be elevated from that a little bit.

Okay. Great. And just with the One Aristocrat $100 million cost out. I'm just trying to sort of think through how we might factor that in. So just interested in how incremental that cost out is? Because I think on Slide 18, you have sort of highlighted a few different areas like DTC and sort of interactive. So we sort of assume that, that's an incremental $100 million above and beyond what we might have already expected from those sorts of trends from those things on that slide?

The way how we think about it is really about cost optimization, that will drive from segment profit, D&D and corporate costs, really focusing on how we execute more effectively. We will probably reinvest a portion of that to continue to support the organic growth. But it's really just an ongoing momentum on our focus on the scaling of the organization and driving more efficiency. It doesn't really play into things like D2C. It's more about the actual cost base of the organization.

Our next question comes from Mark Wilson from RBC.

Look, just looking at the operating efficiency targets there, I guess, are there any programs that are different from what you are currently undertaking to drive that amount? Or is this just a continuation of what we have seen over the last sort of 12 to 18 months?

It's a continuation with a focus on a very specific target and really looking at driving the efficiency across the organization. So looking at how we execute, looking at our organized. We spent June of last year look in our operating model. This is now really ramping up to drive the scale and efficiency from that One Aristocrat operating model.

Okay. And then just in relation to product Madness and Interactive, it looks as though both units were impacted by either recently divested or exited businesses. I know you did give some indication of the revenue impact of the exit within Interactive. But just in terms of an earnings impact, approximately what do you think that was in the half?

I think what I've said for both of the business is both Big Fish and white label, which were the businesses that you're referring to as exits. The bottom line contribution was negligible. It's more a revenue top line impact.

Our next question comes from Andre Fromyhr from UBS.

Just wanted to ask about then the ops business, the drivers of fee per day. I think in previous results, you've sort of talked about how much has been mix and pricing and other things. And in particular, I'm fascinated by Class II installed base was another 6-month period of marginally negative. So interested in sort of why that's showing up in Class II and the role that it's played on the fee per day?

Yes. So thanks, Andre. Just on the fee per day piece. Fee per day is a mix of the installed base, and we continue to grow installed base in the half as we're now heading towards the top end of the 4,000 to 5,000 for the full year, I'm very confident around the shape of that. As far as fee per day goes, we continue to manage fee per day which is near control. So looking at the products that are now coming to market such as Spooky Link Grand, Buffalo Mega, the NFL games coming in time plus 10 years Lightning Link and Monopoly all priced above our current pricing. So again, higher performing games on higher-performing cabinets seeing that price per -- fee per day increase. So we continue to see the ability to improve our fee per day over time, but it is across a large installed base. And I feel confident that the releases and the structure of the portfolio is taking proactive steps towards managing fee per day going forward. As far as the Class 2 goes, that was really due to a decline in a Class 2 to Class III conversion within a property. So I would call it -- yes, it was down, but it was only down a couple of hundred units, and that is really just conversions of Class II to Class III. Installed base of floor space remains the same from the company's perspective. We still see opportunity to place more Class II product going forward. So from my perspective, it's just the case of moving from Class II to Class III, overall net installs have gone up and we're confident we'll be at the top end of that 4,000 to 5,000 at the end of the year as well.

Okay. And then if you don't mind, I was just going to ask about Interactive as well. I mean you've reiterated the USD 1 billion revenue target today. But you've also -- that's been in the market. for a little while now. Is it fair to say that progress to date has probably been behind plan? And what gives you that confidence that you can catch up in the remaining years before FY '29?

Yes. That's a good question. I think we've owned it in the last 6 months or so that we are behind where we wanted to be on the target for Interactive, but we remain connected to it. I think the things that have been a bit slower than we anticipated was the rate of the U.S. market opening, some of the regulatory changes in the U.K. market, and also some of the execution, the time it's taken us to execute through the portfolio, both from a technology and games approval perspective. But what we do feel confident about is that we do see scaling of land-based franchises into digital. And we've seen that already with some of the land base games, and we're obviously excited about Lightning Link coming through. We're also focusing on as these markets are open, being ready to open with them. So we are in all markets except for Rhode Island at this stage, but we expect to see Rhode Island in Maine and other Canadian provinces open. At the same time, we're now at 94% access to the market, and we feel that we've built the leadership team with Dylan and other executives we brought in, they're bringing in the capacity to drive towards that $1 billion. So your comment is fair. Well behind where we want it to be, and we own that. But we also believe that between the content work that's going on, also the iLottery business, one is in Massachusetts and Michigan coming online in July. Colorado, which is an open RFP at the moment and continuing to scale those businesses. We see those as great ways to drive towards the $1 billion target. The platforms business, it's a good stable business, but adding in incremental capabilities such as Gaming Analytics, we see as a way to enhance that business and to create more momentum towards that $1 billion.

So in summary, we've got a sharpened focus on this. We've recruited the right talent execution. We've organized the commercial teams, and we've got line of sight on the things that we know we can control to get towards that target.

Our next question comes from Adrian Lemme from Citi Group.

Just firstly, able to give a bit more color around this exit in white label in iGaming. What was it about? What drove that decision, please?

So the decision on white label, there's a couple of things. First of all, we continue to look at the portfolio on where we are allocating capital, we're allocating resources to businesses and we look at the return profiles on that. When you look at some of the changes that have happened in the white label market, particularly in the U.K. with game structure, taxes, operating regimes we deem that, that was not a good investment for our company, and we're reprioritizing investment into other parts of the Interactive business. So it was a choice to actually refocus our investment around the areas that are important to us and where we have a good opportunity to win and to leave.

And could I just ask a question on legal costs? Obviously, nice to see the cost recovery come through. But the legal costs, are they going to stay somewhat elevated now as new AI-generated content is put out by competitors, which has the potential to infringe on your IP?

I think we've always defended our IP, and that's not going to change. We have processes and protocols in place to do that. I would expect legal fees to come down with the litigation behind us. But obviously, this year, there's a little bit of a hangover as we go into the second half as we close out some of the settlement matters. But we're not, at this point, anticipating elevated legal costs specifically to address AI IP infringement.

Our next question comes from Kai Erman from Jefferies.

Just one on gaming margins. Just looking at the reported gaming margin, particularly in North America in this result. Could you talk about some of the drivers of that? Was that impacted by the mix from strong outright sale result? Or were there any other sort of factors driving that margin result?

No, you're exactly hit it on there, Kai. It's really just an over skewing of the outright performance, which was an exceptional performance over 13,000 units up to 31% market ship share for the half. So it is really just a mix piece. And I'm very proud of the results the team have achieved in full sales units through the half as well.

And then thinking into the second half, given expectations or some CPA growth, you've obviously flagged some of the high-performing games you guys have released under resulting gaming ops. Is it a true to assume that margins should sort of step up in gaming into the second half.

My view is when you're sitting at a profit margin in the 56, 57, I would guide to the fact that that's a strong profit margin, and we're comfortable we can maintain that sort of level. I wouldn't be factoring in growth in profit margins where there's still opportunity out there to take share and also to place products. So I feel very comfortable with the margins. The company is returning in North America and also feel that we're able to hold that margin while we continue to grow the business.

And I think normally wary that -- sorry, when you look historically where it sits, does between kind of range, and it is highly dependent on the ARO sales volume in any 1 period, including adjacencies, which are at a lower margin.

Our next question comes from Justin Barratt from CLSA.

Just wanted to follow up maybe on Kai's question around outright sales. Obviously, another very, very strong half for you guys. And then when we look at, I guess, some data that we will have access to forward purchasing intentions for Aristocrat look to be -- continue to be quite strong or elevated. I just wanted to see you've given some guidance, I guess, around how we should frame net add expectations for the full year. But how should we think about outright sales? Can this sort of momentum continue into the second half?

Yes. Thanks, Justin. I think we've now put together 2 halves between the last half and this half of around 13,000 units in for sale. So there's a mix in that, which is adjacencies, and that sits somewhere between 21% and 25% of that market, and that could be somewhat volatile as we've spoken to in the past. What I would guide you to is the outright sales strength in the actual replacements and new openings, and we're seeing strong momentum there, which the team have converted on in this half. We've got a portfolio of games coming through in the second half that we see both hardware and games is the potential to continue to take share in the second half. So you're right, the anticipated share is strong for us credit. We feel confident we've got the portfolio, the hardware to come through in the second half and continue to have very strong outright sales.

Fantastic. And then sorry to come back to it, but just on the One Aristocrat program. I just wanted to, I guess, see if you could talk somewhat segmentally about where you think you're going to drive the benefits from that program. I guess you just could have called out interactive and DTCI product madness, specifically as beneficiaries potentially of that program. But is it sort of across the board? Or should we expect to see the benefits in certain segments more than others?

It's across the cost board. Justin, it's really an enterprise-wide initiative. Looking at our One Aristocrat operating model and how we drive efficiency from our growing business so that we work as effectively as possible in delivering the outcomes that we deliver to the customers and obviously, to the market as well. So it's not 1 targeted area. It's a holistic approach to our organization and how we actually execute as an organization.

Great. And if I just squeeze 1 more in. Just noting for you, Sally, the capital allocation framework, at least the presentation of that framework has changed slightly versus the FY '25 result. I just wanted to see if there's anything that we should be thinking about in relation to the change in presentation. Has there been any sort of subtle changes to the allocation framework that we should be aware of?

No changes to our allocation framework at all. I guess what we were trying to focus on is that we have simplified so you would see some of the tables have gone now into the appendix are really focusing on how we allocate our capital and also the elevated shareholder returns that we've been able to achieve over the last 5 years. But nothing has changed in the way we think about capital and capital allocation across the organization.

Our next question comes from David Fabris from Macquarie.

To start off with, can you help us better understand the Gaming Ops commercialization strategy? Like we know you target revenue growth, and I assume that you're making commercial decisions on fee per day versus installs because we're constantly hearing from your customers around discounts on legacy products, promos on new products, tribal compact changes. So I'm curious, realistically, can you grow the installs and get fee per day growth sustainably going forward? Or do we need to think about this being one or the other and not both?

Yes. Look, thanks, David. Appreciate that. I think what we look at is we look at growing our gaming ops revenue opportunity in the organization, so that can come through both installed base and fee per day what we've been addressing over the last 18 months is the mix within the product portfolio and bringing forward high-performing cabinets and games. But we do still see an installed base out there that is high-performing and very high performing when you look at versus competitor fee per days. So the way we think about it is how do we think about the incremental revenue we can generate through gaming operations each year, and that will cover a mix between both fee per day and installed base, and we see opportunity in both of those metrics to grow the business going forward and therefore, grow revenue as a whole for us.

Yes. Okay. Okay. And then a few questions just on AI. Have you set up a dedicated hub? Or how have you structured that across the business?

No, we haven't set up a dedicated hub, but as we spoke earlier, Bob Serr, who has joined us from Microsoft most recently has come on board and he is leading the implementation of AI. We have been working with AI for a number of years, and we've been looking at it at various aspects of how it benefits and enhances our products and our business and our operations. But Bob is really the guy that brings practical application of that. Dafne also comes to us with a proven track record in AI implementation in global matrix organizations. So we are using both the internal knowledge of our capability, also our own skills and capability, but also those externals and those new leaders to help us develop AI as a core capability across the organization. We see it sitting, as we said earlier, about enhancing creativity, improving the velocity in the speed to market and then powering insights and optimization as the real drivers for AI at Aristocrat. There are obviously going to be other areas that are more organizational, but they're the key drivers for us within Aristocrat for AI.

Yes, that's helpful. Because yes, I'm then thinking about the $100 million cost benefit program. Is AI supportive in '27? Or will we really see that to support costs in '28?

We don't link AI to cost. We see 2 separate things. We see 1 is productivity, 1 is efficiencies. And you can maybe define that differently if you like. But the way we think of AI is it's about enhancing an ecosystem, an ecosystem which is defined by a strong regulatory environment. Strong customers, important brands in IP, great talent and innovation at pace. And we believe that, that ecosystem is an important ecosystem to advance and grow our organization and also to create better games better experiences for our players and our operators. We don't link the 2 together. There will be opportunity to improve our efficiencies but the productivity program that we're talking about is actually around our organizational model and the way we operate as Sally said earlier.

Got it. And sorry, one last question for me. Just on the buyback, can you clarify when you can be back in the market? I recall at the last result, there was a nuance that stopped you getting in pretty quickly.

We can be in the buyback from tomorrow.

Our next question comes from the line of Angus Hewitt from Morningstar.

I just got a follow-up question on AI. And I appreciate the slide you had there on the opportunity you see. But could you touch on how you view the threat we're seeing competitors invest in AI and you're enjoying cost efficiencies already. But do these efficiencies narrow the gap you have over competitors, particularly in D&D, effectively elevating weaker competitors?

Yes. Thanks, Angus. I guess the way we look at this is, as I said, it's a bit about an ecosystem and that ecosystem includes a strong regulatory framework where regulatory environment actually requires certain levels of compliance and structure that are in place. Obviously, customers having strong and good relation to the customers continuing to be customer-centric. Our brands and our IP is that the branded portfolio Aristocrat is the best branded portfolio in the gaming industry and the IP behind that is the best performing IP as well. The talent, our talent has embraced AI as a way to enhance the way that they make games as we said, enhancing creativity. And then the innovation is continuing to be an innovative pace. So we see that Aristocrat is well positioned to be a leader in AI in the gaming industry. And also, we don't see it as a way that is going to diminish our competitiveness. In fact, we see it by embracing it as a way to become more competitive and continue to lead in the greatest content delivery.

Our next question comes from the line of Rohan Sundram of MST Financial.

Just 1 for me regarding your North America or even your global land-based business. How would you describe your forward order visibility at present in terms of, say, weeks or months? And has it improved over time?

Yes. Rohan, our visibility is very good. I'm very comfortable with what we can see in our pipeline, both from a product delivery point of view, customer opportunity, manufacturing and supply chain. We've embedded a lot of systems across the group globally now that gives us greater visibility and predictability of our performance. So I feel confident -- well, we feel confident sitting here talking to you about how we see the half year -- full year finishing. And that confidence comes from a good ability to see games, hardware and product being released into markets and the visibility of the pipeline. I feel comfortable about it.

Our next question comes from the line of Liam Robertson of Jarden.

Just 1 quick 1 on the cost savings. Just interested if you're expecting to see any in the second half of just conscious of what the run rate needs to look like as we exit this financial year to deliver those savings into '27?

Probably, there will be an element in the second half, but there will be actions that we need to take that may also actually drive some costs. So it's really a focus on FY '27.

Okay. Great. And then just quickly, I mean follow-up on North American market. Clearly, really strong performance in outright sales, both units and ASP. Just interested in how, I guess, defendable that ASP growth is into the second half of '26?

A couple of things, Liam, from an ASP point of view. First of all, I think performance is what drives premium ASP, so both hardware and game performance, and we've got a strong portfolio of games that are performing well and a portfolio of games to be released in the second half, which we expect to see performance. I think the other part there is you've probably seen some of the commentary about the One Big Beautiful Bills around the way that has been considered by some of the operators. We don't see that as a negative but as a positive for gaining placement in the ability to expense capital cost straight away. So from our perspective, performance hardware will drive ASP, and we're confident in both of those.

Right. And then just last 1 on AI. I mean I appreciate the color you provided today. Just maybe on the improving velocity to market. Are there any hard metrics or proof points that I guess you can provide us with. I mean what I'm really interested in maybe is around the gaming business, the historical cadence of new game releases. What was up through the half? Has that already improved? And where do you think you can get that to?

Yes. So we've referenced the fact that we are doing game conversions now, which is an original game into an alternative market, we reduced that from 16 weeks down to 1 week. Now we don't -- AI won't increase the regulatory approval time frames, but it will improve in the migration from market to market. It also will improve testing and prototyping as far as speed goes. So we are seeing that starting to flow through the organization now, and we see that as an opportunity to be able to move games into markets, adjacent markets quicker. And that's where our focus is from an AI perspective is building that capability within our organization, noting that the regulatory framework is largely unchanged around testing and approvals from that point of view.

Our next question comes from the line of Sam Bradshaw from Evans & Partners.

Just wondering if you can give us a bit of color on the international outright sales cadence. Obviously, the first half appears to be a little bit out of cycle. Wondering if you can give us a bit more color on what we should expect in the second half and potentially into FY '27 as well?

Yes. International is a little bit more volatile, Sam, to be honest with you, it's a smaller part of our business. It tends to be a little bit more volatile, largely driven by new openings from the international perspective. So what we saw in the first half was basically no new openings, and we saw the same in the first half of last year from a year's point of view. When we look at second half, obviously, we're looking towards expectations around what might happen with the Wynn property opening, but that has somewhat been delayed at the moment. But we do see into FY '27, a number of markets in Europe that are seeing expansion and that we will be ready to participate in those expansions. So in the rest of world, there was effectively next to no new openings in the first half. We do expect to see some in the second half in Asia. We're not clear on what's going to happen with wind at the moment. We are ready and capable to that, but we're waiting to see what happens with the that property.

Great. And if I can, can I just ask how MONOPOLY is going? It's been 1 of the most hyped games that I can remember in my time. Wondering if you got any early feedback for us on that game?

Yes, it's going really well. Thanks. We're very happy with that performance of Monopoly. It's come out of the blocks very strong in -- on the floors. Certainly looking like about a 3x floor, but we're very happy with the way that it's come to market. We're also very excited about not just the performance of the game but the pipeline that's behind it. We've got a very solid pipeline supporting that. And the social media and interest around the game on casino floors has been very well received as well. So Monopoly is very happy where that sits. Similarly, Buffalo Mega Stampede, it's been the #1 game -- new game now for 6 months, probably 7 months next week, continues to have very strong performance. It's been a great game for us in the first half, driving a lot of our momentum as well. And then Lightning Link 10 year. And also Spooky Link are both performing well from our perspective. So overall portfolio performance is very, very happy with it at the moment.

In the interest of time, we will now take the last question. The last question comes from Sriharsh Singh from Bank of America.

A couple of questions from me. One, can we -- is there a realistic chance of you exceeding the 5,000 gaming ops net adds for 2026. And where we're coming from is you've added 2,000 machines in the first half you are about to enter a new product cycle. You've dominated April new premium game rankings and you can probably add 1,000 machines and Monopoly in second half, which is just starting. So what is there an element that might prevent you from not adding 3,000 machines in the second half?

Yes. Thanks, Sriharsh. A nice question for today. All I would say is when you see the ILS report, which will come out very soon, you'll see that we've had a very strong April, and we feel very confident around our pipeline for the next 5 months to close out the full financial year. If we are looking like we're going to change or go beyond that number, we'll naturally update you. But we feel confident in saying that we're at the top end of the 4,000 to 5,000, and we have the confidence around the portfolio, the commercialization, the customer relationships to deliver that.

Awesome. That's great. Second question, a little bit more long term around your $1 billion iGaming revenue target. And could I -- could we talk a little bit about the European iGaming content opportunity? And I think the U.S. opportunity is pretty well understood, but Europe is something we talk less about, but the TAM is 3 to 4x bigger. You've got minimal market share there or content share there. Is that part of your $1 billion revenue scale up? And can you get to high single-digit content share in European iGaming in 3 to 4 years?

Yes. Thanks, Sriharsh. I think first of all, when you have the opportunities that we have in front of us, iGaming, it's important to stay focused and we're really focused on the North American market, the Canadian market and the U.K. market. Your hypothesis around Europe is right. There are some moving pieces in Europe around the way the tax regimes in various countries are changing, some of the access is changing as well. But we do believe that our land-based content will resonate in iGaming, and we've seen that initially, and we expect to see that be very confidently reinforced when we launched Lightning Link later this year. So we do see Europe as part of that. We are focused on getting our role share in North America and Canada, which are close to our core markets and continuing to build in Europe, both from our land-based gaming business part of view, where we hold sort of 22 share of installed base to getting a stronger position in iGaming in the markets where we can compete effectively. So it is part of our geographical opportunity in the $1 billion, yes.

That concludes the Q&A session. I would like to hand the call back to Trevor for closing remarks.

Thank you. I just wanted to reinforce to all of you that the team at Aristocrat remain focused on delivering high-quality growth for shareholders. We're focused on continuous and sustainable market share growth and also shareholder returns. Thank you for your ongoing interest in Aristocrat and we remain committed to delivering high performance and high quality for our shareholders. Have a great day, and we appreciate your time.

That concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Goodbye.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aristocrat's 2025 Sustainability Disclosure Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Harry Ashton, Group General Manager of Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. My name is Harry Ashton, and I'm the Group General Manager of Sustainability at Aristocrat. Joining me today are Vanessa Shepherd, our Director of Group Sustainability; James Coghill, our General Manager of Investor Relations; and Prashani Veerasamy, our Manager of Investor Relations.

Earlier this week, we published Aristocrat's FY '25 sustainability report on our website. We also published an accompanying sustainability data book, which brings together all of our sustainability metrics in a stand-alone transparent resource. I encourage everyone to explore both documents. These disclosures reflect a further step forward in our maturity of our sustainability journey.

FY '25 marked the first year of executing our refreshed sustainability strategy, underpinned by a comprehensive double materiality assessment completed in FY '24. That process helped us identify the 13 most material sustainability matters to our global business, which we're now managing under 4 strategic pillars: Good Governance and Responsible Business, Empowering Safer Play, which is our most material sustainability matter; Operational Sustainability & Climate; and People & Community. Let me take a few minutes to walk through progress under each of those pillars.

Striving to uphold high governance standards and strong compliance with gaming and other regulations is fundamental to Aristocrat. Under the first pillar, good governance and responsible business, we strengthened our sustainability governance to prepare for mandatory reporting requirements. In FY '25, Aristocrat's Board of Directors approved updates to the Board and committee charters to reflect new responsibilities for climate-related risks and opportunities and mandatory reporting. We also further integrated sustainability governance considerations into our enterprise risk management framework.

Progress area under this pillar was the launch of our AI governance program. This provides the framework for responsible use of AI across Aristocrat. It establishes accountability, oversight and clear approval processes for AI systems while promoting innovation that is ethical and secure.

We also completed the integration of NeoGames into our compliance program, expanded anti-money laundering and anti-bribery programs and piloted a new governance model for mandatory training, which will be fully implemented in FY '26.

In cybersecurity, we continue to invest in automation and resilience, achieving ISO certifications for Aristocrat Interactive, deploying a new application for risk assessment and refreshing information security policies across the group.

Our second pillar, Empowering Safer Play remains at the heart of Aristocrat's sustainability agenda. Responsible gameplay or Empowering Safer Play, as we call it, is our most material sustainability issue. And in FY '25, we continue to strive for global leadership in this space. We refreshed our entire Empowering Safer Play policy suite to capture the expanded Aristocrat Interactive business after the acquisition of NeoGames.

We also made strong progress towards reaccreditation of Aristocrat Interactive's iLottery business under the World Lottery Association's safer gambling standard, representing the highest level of international certification.

In player education, we refined our Know Your Max campaign for North American markets and launched it for the first time in Canada. The program, which helps players understand how slots work and encourages positive play habits, reached over 46 million impressions globally.

In Product Madness, we doubled delivery of in-game safer play messages, over 15 million messages sent this year, informed by academic research to improve tone and effectiveness. These messages are triggered by markers in player behavior, supporting harm minimization in a targeted and meaningful way.

Internally, we launched our first enterprise-wide employee awareness survey on empowering Safer Play. We achieved a satisfaction rating of over 80%, meeting our target 2 years ahead of schedule.

With regards to innovation, our Flexi Play tool, which enables players to manage their time and spend on Aristocrat gaming machines is now on 11,000 electronic gaming machines in New South Wales, Australia, which is an increase from around 4,000 in FY '24.

We also deepened our research partnerships, launching a multiyear collaboration with the International Center for Responsible Gaming, and we committed funding to a variety of community organizations in our key markets supporting treatment and prevention of gambling harm.

Finally, we became a founding member of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas AI Research Hub, an initiative exploring the intersection of AI and responsible gameplay. Collectively, these actions show our focus on shaping industry best practice and continuing to lead with purpose under the banner of Good Business, Good Citizen.

Turning now to our third pillar, Operational Sustainability & Climate, where FY '25 marks a further maturing of our processes. This year, we prepared our climate action disclosures with reference to selected provisions of the new Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards. This gives investors a preview of what our future climate disclosures will look like from FY '26 onwards with incoming mandatory reporting frameworks for Australia and abroad.

We also achieved limited assurance for the first time on our Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions and on our climate governance disclosures, and this work means we are well positioned for these incoming requirements.

Operationally, we transitioned our Sydney head office and Australian integration center to renewable electricity, avoiding more than 1,500 tonnes of emissions each year. We conducted our first climate scenario analysis. We expanded our hybrid vehicle fleet in Australia to 78% of all vehicles, avoiding roughly 330 tonnes of emissions in FY '25. And we optimized our logistics network through the Chicago X dock model, which reduces Scope 3 transport emissions by increasing load efficiency and cutting total freight times.

We also continue to embed circular economy principles, refurbishing over 6,400 electronic gaming machines and repairing more than 68,000 components this year, extending product life spans and reducing waste.

On the supply side, we refreshed our supplier code of conduct, assessed over 700 suppliers under our global supplier sustainability program and deepened engagement on climate maturity and responsible sourcing. These actions underscore our strong focus on achieving our science-based emission reduction targets to achieve net zero across our value chain by 2050.

Our fourth pillar, People & Community focuses on helping our people thrive and creating positive impact in the communities where we operate. In FY '25, we recorded a total recordable incident rate of 0.53, which is an increase of a low base of 0.32 from last year. Despite this, we expanded our AI-driven safety monitoring system to the Tulsa Integration Center after strong results in Las Vegas, achieving a 20% reduction in safety incidents at this facility.

Across our U.S. vehicle fleet, we improved safety and sustainability outcomes through the implementation of -- [indiscernible] AI.

We recorded an employee Net Promoter Score of 53, exceeding the technology sector by 14 points, a sign that our people feel engaged and valued.

In diversity, equity and inclusion, our overall female representation reduced slightly to 31.9%, reflecting the impact of acquisitions and divestments, but we saw gains in race and ethnicity representation across leadership in the U.S. and the U.K.

We continue to support 32 employee impact groups worldwide, empowering employees to lead initiatives around gender, culture, disability and LGBTQI+ inclusion.

Finally, through our Aristocrat Cares community giving program, we contributed more than USD 3.9 million to over 150 not-for-profit organizations this year. Highlights include our 3-year funding commitment to the Campus of Hope project in Las Vegas, supporting people experiencing homelessness. Our continued support to increase tribal representation in gaming and STEM careers in the U.S. and long-standing partnerships with the Cerebral Palsy Alliance, Literacy India and community programs across Australia and New Zealand. These initiatives embody our belief that business success and community well-being go hand in hand.

As we look to FY '26, Aristocrat enters a new phase, one that will see aspects of our sustainability reporting integrated into our annual reporting cycle and subject to assurance. The foundations that were built in FY '25 mean that we're well prepared for this next chapter.

In closing, FY '25 represents a year of growing maturity for Aristocrat's sustainability program, a year where we strengthened governance, advanced responsible gameplay leadership, made progress on our climate goals and continued to invest in our people and communities.

Thank you once again for joining us today and for your continued engagement and support. I'd now like to open up the call for any questions and comments.

[Operator Instructions]

Operator, it's James here. While we're waiting for a few questions to come through, I might just ask Harry a couple of questions just to bridge the gap. It's been a big year for our sustainability team. I think we've achieved a huge amount. If you can just reflect back what 2 or 3 items stand out for you as the big achievements from the team this year.

Yes. Thanks, James. I guess for me, what I would say, first and foremost is my response is based upon my own experience because I look after a couple of these functions. So there have been a lot of highlights over the course of the year, and I won't go into all of them. But for me, personally, I think it's our continued progress in Empowering Safer Play.

I think for me -- I mean, you can find all the highlights in the report. But for me, the most amazing thing about this year from that perspective is just the passion and drive of the team to keep driving forward as the business expands.

I think another area which probably needs to be mentioned, as I mentioned at the outset in the comments was our uplifted climate disclosures. It's been a year of birth for us, obviously, assurance with Scopes 1, 2 and governance, our first ever scenario analysis, a full qualitative assessment. So that for me has been a real highlight. And I guess, operationally, the real pleasing part of that has been the partnership between the sustainability team and the finance team. We're really integrating a lot of our processes into the finance team this year, and the collaboration has been excellent.

That's great. And I mean if you can reflect back on -- just on some of the challenges. I mean we've observed how hard the team has worked over the course of the year, and that was following a number of years of investment in sustainability at Aristocrat.

For those that haven't jumped on to the website yet, not only is there a comprehensive sustainability report there, but we also have a sustainability data book. So we had a lot of feedback from investors about increased granularity and accountability in our sustainability program. And hopefully, that's building up a framework of numbers that we can track and progress that we can help be held to account over.

So just reflecting back on some of the challenges to get the team to this point and get our disclosures to this point, Harry, what else could you share with us some of the challenges that you've experienced over the year?

Yes. I think that -- I mean, tied to, I guess, the first comments I made, one of the big challenges for us this year was just going through the audit process. I think this was a first for us. It was just an added level of complexity and process that we went through. Luckily, we got through it because of the strong partnerships, as I mentioned before. But -- and I think part of this is just a matter of us adjusting to the new process and standards. So that's probably one.

I guess the other area just to mention is that we did sort of go backwards in a couple of areas, which are documented in the report. I mentioned before that we had -- we went backwards slightly in diversity, equity and inclusion where in the area of female employees across the group. We had a slightly higher or a higher total reportable incident rate, and we had a slightly lower supplier diversity spend. But I think the key point there is that progress isn't linear. And I think these are multiyear projects that we're working on. And hopefully, over the long term, you'll see the trajectory moving in the right direction. That's certainly our objective.

Sorry is there more questions?

There are no further questions on the call, operator. So I'll hand over -- I'll hand back to Harry, who can just share a few concluding remarks.

Thanks, James. And thanks once again for joining us and for your continued engagement and support. We welcome your continued feedback and our contact e-mail can be found on Page 3 of the sustainability report. Otherwise, feel free to reach out to James or Prashani if you'd like to organize a meeting with the team to discuss the sustainability report in more detail. Otherwise, thank you, and good morning.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Aristocrat Full Year 2025 Results Briefing Webcast and Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

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 Aristocrat. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Aristocrat's financial results presentation for the full year to 30 September 2025. My name is Trevor Croker, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Aristocrat. Joining me today is Sally Denby, our Chief Financial Officer. 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.

FY '24 was restated to exclude Plarium at the last result. Please note the usual disclaimer statement on the back of the deck.

Turning now to Slide 2. Risk rate 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 FY '26 onwards, our mobile operations will be focused purely on social casino. Our 3 complementary business segments are now united by a common core of great gaming [indiscernible] 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%, benefiting from strong organic growth the inclusion of Neo games for the full 12 months and FX translation. Aristocrat Gaming delivered strong performance driven by an outstanding second half outright sales across all market segments with significant share gains in North America and ANZ where our ship share recovered to over 50%. Gaming operations delivered installed base 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 in user acquisition, high-performing content and effective execution of our direct-to-consumer strategy. Interactive benefited from double-digit organic growth in content and in lottery, including from the Neo Polar joint venture.

Group NPATA 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 NPATA 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 4 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 have 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. Aristocrat 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 [indiscernible] continues to progress in both the U.S. and Australia. We are pleased with the U.S. Court's recent decision to extend discovery and require [indiscernible] to provide access to game maps for certain of its Holden spin games.

Next, we focus on growing and distributing our leading content aiming to take share wherever we compete including an 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 scaled global player in this important adjacency and to position the interactive business to accelerate its growth consistent with our stated target of achieving USD 1 billion of revenue by FY '29.

Aristocrat also invests in differentiating enablers. These include long-term customer partnerships and commercialization 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 5-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. NPATA has grown at 27% CAGR. This was underpinned by market share gains in gaming operations installed 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 investments that fully fund our organic growth and invest behind inorganic growth priorities while delivering ongoing returns to shareholders. Over the same 5-year period, we've returned over $4.3 billion of capital to shareholders through dividends and on-market share buybacks.

Turning to Slide 6. 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 6 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 property 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 FY '25 sustainability disclosures which we [ publish ] on the December 2, 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 8, our group results summary. As Trevor mentioned, Aristocrat delivered NPATA of $1.6 billion over the year, an increase of 12%. On a fully diluted basis, EPSA increased 15% to $2.47 reflecting solid operational performance and accretion from 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, unit 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. EBITDA was 16% higher than the PCP, reflecting margin expansion from favorable mix and improved operating leverage. Benefits from effective cost initiatives taken in FY '24 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 [indiscernible] integration center in the U.S. through corporate costs. Legal costs increased by $33 million compared to FY '24, which includes legal costs associated with taking proactive steps to defend Aristocrat's intellectual property including $21 million in relation to our ongoing litigation against like [indiscernible]. Interest income decreased by $34 million compared to the PCP, primarily due to lower average cash balances following the NeoGames acquisition and continued share buybacks over the course of the year.

Interest expense for the period includes one-off expense 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 U.S. dollar borrowings. 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 impact airline.

Finally, the directors have authorized an unfranked firma dividend of $0.49 per share for the half year ended 30th of September 2025. representing a payout ratio of 37.4%. The full year dividend of $0.93 per share represents an increase of 19% over FY '24.

Slide 9 provides a snapshot of the drivers of Empire Air growth over the reporting period. NPATA 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 favorable 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 investments to support continued growth in the North American gaming operations install base partly offset by the proceeds on the sale of property as previously flagged. Acquisitions and divestments 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 have 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 deliver shareholder returns. In particular, the business achieved organic growth through consistent, strong and disciplined D&D, UA and CapEx investment while actively pursuing strategic M&A opportunities in a disciplined and consistent manner.

Post year-end, we completed the acquisition of Awager, an exciting adjacent opportunity in line with our growth strategy. Aristocrat invested $800 million in D&D during the year to further strengthen our product and technology portfolio and laid the foundations for scaling in online RMG. This represented 12.7% of revenue compared to 13.4% for FY '24. Aristocrat manages its balance sheet 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 1 to 2x 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 around 25% to 27% of group revenue 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 installed base as well as the investment in the commissioning of our Las Vegas integration center in the prior year. This is 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 AUD 35 million previously incorrectly included in D&D where we classified the 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 continue to invest a significant proportion of revenues in our gaming content, plus 2 mobile and a new Hampshire lottery. We maintained D&D investment levels in Product Madness with a small step of put gaming to support content development. As discussed for the past 2 results, the grand proportion of D&D investment related 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 division. Instead, we will be aligning D&D report into the way Aristocrat now manages this important investment in 2 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 purchase 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 at mid-single-digit growth next year on a constant currency basis.

I'll now hand back to Trevor to step through operational performance.

Thanks, Sally. Turning first to the Aristocrat Gaming business on Slide 15. Revenue and profit increased 9% and 7%, respectively, in reported currency, driven by outstanding performance and strong share gains in North America and Australian outright sales in the second half of the year along with continued share gains in our North American gaming operations business. Innovations in both games and hardware contributed to the success with titles such as Phoenix Link, Spooky Link, House of the Dragon and Buffalo Ultimate Stampede being well received in the U.S. while Thunder Empire and Cashman drove penetration in Australia. In North America, our game performance continues to run at 1.4x for average, maintaining a healthy gap to our major competitors. The Baron cabinet was welcomed enthusiastically by customers around the globe. Dragon Link continued to perform well in its eighth year with particularly strong demand in Asia under a hybrid commercial model. North American revenues and profits were up 5% and 3%, respectively.

Gaming operations revenue growth was driven by a 6% increase in installed base over the prior year. We achieved sequential improvement of 2% in our market-leading fee per day in the second half driven by effective portfolio execution and support of GGR growth. We added almost 4,100 units over the year further extending our market-leading share to around 43%. North American outright sales exhibited clear revenue leadership given the combination of strong average selling price, or ASP, and ship share of around 31%. Outright sales units increased 18% in the second half, driven primarily by the Baron [ Upright ] Cabinet, which was released in April. Demand was further supported by the success of games like Spooky Link which achieved the fastest ramp-up of any outright game sales product in Aristocrat's history and has taken the top 3 spots on Isle's core games leaderboard for the past 3 months. ASP increased by 1% and remains at leading levels overall. Adjacencies increased 29% over the PCP and represented 26% of total unit sales, driven by continued expansion in the Georgia [indiscernible], historical horse racing and Quebec VLT markets.

North America's margins of 57.8% decreased by 110 basis points, reflecting the mix effect of the exceptionally strong outright sales performance. As we move into FY '26, we don't anticipate a material impact from tariffs. Rest of World revenues and profits increased 11% and 9%, respectively, driven by a strong rebound in both ANZ and Asia. We previously flagged the timing of the highly anticipated release of the Baron Cabinet in ANZ half winter in the year. The Baron scaled quickly with strong customer demand and effective commercialization along with a host of game innovations, including Thunder Empire and Cashman, our ship share in Australia rebounded to 52% in the second half with unit sales more than doubling and ASP increasing by 8%.

Rest of World performance, excluding ANZ was also weighted to the second half due to higher opening and expansion activity in Asia with a strong uplift in recurring revenue units.

Turning to Product Madness on Slide 16. The business delivered strong performance in a transformational year with refreshed leadership and more effective integration into the enterprise. The benefits of our mobile operations being focused on social casino have been evident this year. Product Madness continued to take share in a contracting market through investment in new content, effective player engagement, live ops and features. Social casino bookings increased 5% driven by growth in our evergreen franchises, including Lightning Link, Cashman Casino and Heart of Vegas compared to a social slot market decline of 9%. We are confident in our market position and our ability to grow in the future. Segment profit was up an impressive 12%.

Margins improved 380 basis points driven by a continued focus on efficiency increased off-platform revenues and disciplined new ad investment. We continue to drive D2C revenue growth by offering better value to players and actively promoting these through various channels. D2C represented 16% of social casino revenues for the full year, up from 7% in the PCP and was over 18% in the second half. We believe there is more scope to steadily grow D2C over the next few years. Product Madness was an early adopter of AI and automation and in progress in this area accelerated in FY '25 as the business shifted to more dynamic and personalized player experiences. We're using AI effectively to automate solutions to expand live ops development and using generative AI art for scaling asset production and quality improvements.

Turning to Interactive. The FY '25 results reflected the inclusion of NeoGames for the full period versus 5 months in FY '24. Revenue increased 7% on a pro forma basis, including the iLottery JV. Profits increased with margins improving 260 basis points for the full year. Excluding the previously referenced reclassification, which represents a full year adjustment of USD 23 million,

Interactive's FY '25 profit margin would have been around 35%, with higher profit margins in the second half compared to the first half. Lottery delivered strong performance with new contract wins and improving metrics across existing contracts. On a pro forma basis, including our share of the JV, revenue growth was 14% with strong contributions from North Carolina and Virginia. Content revenues grew 15% on a pro forma basis, reflecting strong growth from our larger aggregation customers and numerous content launches with major operators in the U.S. and Canada. The consolidation of our remote game server technology over the year allowed us to roll out content across more markets simultaneously, including increasingly complex mechanics and features such as progressive and daily free games. By casino, U.S. market share increased from around 2% in March 2025 to 3.5% in September 2025 and benefit from top-performing games such as Mo Mummy Mighty Pyramid and Bao Zhu Zhao Fu. Platforms continued to expand across the U.S. and ANZ markets, supported by installation expansion and software sales. While significant work lies ahead to realize Interactive's full potential, we are making important and encouraging progress and have full confidence in our plans.

I'd like to share a few notable call-outs. In iLottery, we were recently awarded the contract for the Massachusetts iLottery, beginning July 2026. And and the Michigan iLottery on an exclusive basis also from July 2026.

We will be investing behind these great long-term opportunities. In content, we'll be bringing more of our leading land-based content to digital in the coming year including the iconic Lightning Link and expanding our market access through entering the remaining 2 U.S. states with Delaware and Connecticut having recently launched. And in platforms, we'll be rolling out our mobile Class II product with the Chickasaw Nation at the WinStar World Casino later this month.

Turning now to outlook on Slide 19. The Aristocrat expects to deliver NPATA growth over the full year to 30 September 2026 on a constant currency basis, reflecting continued revenue and market share growth from risk [indiscernible] gaming, supported by resilient underlying GGR growth in key markets. continued market share growth from product managers with an increasing contribution from D2C, accelerating performance at a risk interactive towards our FY '29, USD 1 billion revenue target through further scaling of content and investing in iLottery to support broader market access in North America and Europe.

In summary, the group has delivered a strong result for the financial year 2025 with robust fundamentals, investment and execution driving continued market share gains and operating momentum. Going forward, we remain committed to our capital management strategy and executing our on-market share buyback program. We continue to position Aristocrat from an organizational capability and financial perspective to actively pursue strategic M&A opportunities in a disciplined and consistent manner to accelerate our growth strategy.

Today, Aristocrat's proud to have a global team of approximately 7,400 talented individuals. I want to extend my sincere gratitude to each and every one of our employees for their dedication, passion and hard work throughout this period. With that, I'll conclude the formal part of the presentation and hand it back to the moderator to open the floor for questions.

[Operator Instructions]

We will now take our first question from the line of Adrian Lemme from Citi. Adrian?

Orally. I was interested in your view, Trevor, on the gaming -- North American gaming [indiscernible] market. So I think last year, it grew by 800 units or about 5%, and you took most of it. This year, you've grown by 4,100 units, and you've grown your market share again. So is it that the market has slowed down? And what are your expectations for the next 12 months on the market outlook, please?

Yes. Thanks, Adrian. I appreciate the question. As you rightfully said, in '24 of the market grew, and we drove the majority of that growth, and I'd position the result this year again the same context -- this is the market we drove the majority of market growth. Market share for the top 5 were up about 1 percentage 1% year-over-year to 42.3% of share. I think what we've seen and what we're seeing now is that -- but certainly, there's been better GGR momentum across the market, so a much more supportive model from a GGR perspective. On a new openings basis, it's about the same -- a new open expansions about the same expected in '26 as it was in '25, and we expect to be successful in taking a greater share of those. And then we continue to improve our performance on the floor, both with new games like Phoenix Link, but more recently, Buffalo megas, which is a succession game to [indiscernible] Buffalo, ultimate stamped Cash Express Legends, Meunier and then ultimately monopoly in the second half of next year.

So my view on where the market sits, it's around about the same size. I think Iles are quoting, it's around 15% of the to the total installed base in North America. We feel confident that our expectations in the '26 are consistent with what we've said in the past, which is between 4,000 and 5,000 units of incremental opportunity for Aristocrat, and we feel well positioned with the portfolio. We also have a good line of sight on how to manage fee per day, and we feel comfortable that that's a growth opportunity for us in '26.

We will now take our next question from the line of Justin Barrett from CLSA. Trevor. Look, I just wanted to get you to comment a little bit more on product madness. Clearly, a very strong result. I was particularly interested in your ability to take or drive revenue growth in a declining market. Can you talk about how you're seeing that overall market, your ability to take share? And then obviously, it sounds like Trevor, you're confident in gaining more penetration in the platform as well.

Yes. Thanks, Justin. PM has been a great story for us this year. And I think it goes to the single threadedness of our social casino focus now where we are focused on that portfolio, and that's about monetizing the content that we make in land-based and building good live ops and effective new way around that. The PM business has done an excellent job in the year. And I think where they have positioned themselves to be able to take share in a declining market, but also to set the standard around things like live ops, new game innovation NFL was not a big contributor to the year. So it's not in there and NFL is showing some good early signs, but we'll continue to monitor that as we launch.

So on a go-forward basis, I think if you look at the Evergreen portfolio of apps, they are very robust apps. They've got good content flows and innovation coming out of the gaming content that we make across the group. And then on the D2C, yes, you're right. I think the team has done a great job going from 7% this time last year to 16% this year and 18% in the last quarter is great.

And we do believe that both from a regulatory point -- or a market point of view with the change in some of the operating models with the platforms, that we have the ability to continue to expand on that. So I know that the team is very focused on that. And I think that we are well positioned to improve that percentage and to continue to grow and to take share in Social Casino.

Yes, fantastic. Okay. And then I just wanted to follow up on Adrian's question. I guess the weakness in your net adds or installed, I guess, the net adds number came in the second half. I was just wondering if you could provide any more specific commentary around the second half exactly. And then, I guess, over the last few years, you have absolutely spoken to that sort of 4,000 to 5,000 net adds number, and you've reiterated that again for FY '26. But I guess just given the ongoing penetration of premium leased into the North American market, how long do you think you can maintain that sort of 4,000 to 5,000 net adds for.

Yes. So back on -- back to the first part of that question, which was really around a bit of extra depth around the second half I mean we carried strong installed base from a for Finish Link in the first half, and that continued in the second half. We then built on that with Buffalo Ultimate Stampede, [indiscernible] is and House of Dragon. Those were MSP installs in the business. Also, we've got a portfolio of games coming out for the rest of FY '26, including Lightning Link 10-year store, Buffalo Mega Stampede, which has only really just been released in the last month, it's doing 3.9x floor. Spooky Link Grand, which is the Cape operations extension of the Spooky -- like franchise, which is doing exceptionally well. Plus, as I said, Penile momentum and pipeline there and Cash Express Legends plus a couple of other games. So I guess what I see our portfolio is that the market was quite volatile in the first half from a GGR perspective, if that normalizes in the second half, we were able to continue to work on our momentum of installs. And also, we talk about net installs.

So we were able to refresh some underperforming portfolio as well and improve that. As far as going forward, as I said, I think 4 to 5 in '26 -- between 4,000 and 5,000 in '26 is a good number for Aristocrat. There are about the same number of new openings and expansions Obviously, MONOPOLY is a great opportunity for us in the 26th calendar year, which we're excited by as another incremental add to the portfolio. So I feel comfortable that we will get our rightful share and take share again in gaming operations in FY '26.

We will now take the question from the line of Annabel Li from Goldman Sachs.

Just 1 on D&D, which you flag will increase in the mid-single digits next year. Maybe could you talk about where you're prioritizing that incremental investment?

Rael, thanks for the question. It's Sally here. as we've said before, we are currently in an investment cycle as we continue to scale up the Interactive business and really heavy focus on the investment in technology, which will enable us to efficiently pull content across the 3 distribution channels now. So that remains our focus going forward. And we're increasingly managing the D&D portfolio on a rise basis, which goes to the point that we've made today about changing how we think about it. We're now focused on fundamentally managing the cost -- and as we've said, managing that year-on-year increase within the mid-single-digit range.

We will now take our next question from Matt Ron from Baron Joey.

Just hoping with the participation yield, if you could give us some color on the second half. I think 6 months ago, in quite a lot of detail actually around the mix between sort of coin in promotions, MSP and the different drivers. So just any color you could provide on those types of things and what sort of drove your second half performance? And I guess, leading into that, when you might see that yield start to converge on what overall GGR growth looks like moving forward?

Yes. Thanks, Matt. It broke up a few times. I think you talked about gaming of pay. So couple of levers in there. So we talked about GGR being an impact in the first half, affecting, as you know, because we've got effectively 2/3 of the portfolio participation. So GGR was relatively not volatile, but unpredictable in the first half. We've seen GGR be more supportive in the second half. So that's been a positive contributor to our fee per day performance. At the same time, we've been -- we've seen more favorable on our performance and our pork participation game. So things like Buffalo Ultimate as I mentioned earlier, House of Dragons and [indiscernible] and also increased average foot per day on Phoenix Link. So we have taken the promotional aspects and roll those back over the period as well. And we did say at the half that those were some of the contributing factors, but we have taken those into control. And also, we continue to focus on churning the underperforming games out of the portfolio.

So we continue -- as we said, we would get sequential improvement. We believe that the portfolio continues to give us the right to expect improvement again into next -- into 2026 and the GGR momentum that we've seen in the early part of the year suggests that at this point in time.

And just for the outright sales, obviously, a very strong period. Just interested in your thoughts on I guess, how much of that was driven by the pent-up demand for the Barron cabinet. I guess I'm just trying to think about, obviously, moving forward, you've got a lot of pretty solid releases coming out, just your ability to sustain that level of sales growth?

Yes. Maybe it's best if we break it down by region. So there was pent-up demand in Australia because we didn't launch it until the second half. And at the half, we were talking about the fact that it was only just launching in Australia as we were talking to you in May. So we've just gone live in New South Wales. We're going live at Queensland about to go live in Victoria. That said, that bar and cabinet has been well accepted by Australian cabinet to customers, but also supported by a strong portfolio of games, which have actually helped support the installed base and see in both the cabinet and the games be released. And also seeing the overall game performance of use [indiscernible] portfolio improved. As we said, [ 52 ] ship share at the end of the half is a very strong result. In North America, we already had Barrett upright in the marketplace. I think it was performing well. We then moved to Baron [indiscernible] April. And we saw an acceleration both from the games like Spooky Link that were on that platform, improve the performance of the platform, but also allow for us to gain greater distribution.

I wouldn't have called that pent-up demand because we'd already launched Baron there, and that was really driven by game cycles and new hardware configurations. So strong results there. As far as Baron goes from the rest of the market point of view, it's due to EMEA this year and also into Asia this year being FY '26. And so we see that gains coming through all that portfolio into those markets as opportunity. I felt that the gaming

The full sales numbers for North America and Australia were a real credit to our team. It was the great commercialization, working with our customers, content, hardware and a portfolio of games that we really have a floor average now of about 1.4. Our nearest competitor is 1 to a 40% premium on our floor performance. And I think that ultimately helps our customers decide where to place their capital and we had -- who's going to place. So I think the team did a great job on that basis.

Our next question comes from Sriharsh from Bank of America.

Trevor, it's all -- 2 quick questions from my side. One on ANZ, very strong performance, 52% ships in second half. Can you talk about the ANZ pipeline and and talk about how sustainable this 52% share is. Was there a little bit of a one-off element from the Baron launch at the start of the second half? Or do you think the pipeline should support 50% kind of a ship chain ANZ.

The second question I have is on the North America outright sale market. So very strong performance in the second half. Again, could you talk a little bit about the opportunity to lift ship share in North America to maybe close to 30% because your ship share of flow share in premium gaming ops is over 40%. So maybe you can narrow the gap there. with strong content that is coming online. And lastly, on online content share, 74 new games launched in 2025. When I look at some of the digital-only suppliers, they're launching 250 to 300 games a year, a few of them. Is that the aspiration over the next 1 to 2 years? Or would you follow a slightly different strategy in online slots.

Thanks, Josh. Great way to get 3 questions into 2. Well done. I appreciate it. So firstly, from the ANZ perspective, 52% share. As I said just earlier, I think there was an element of pent-up demand from the hardware coming out with the Australian team. But there was also other initiatives like MAX, the team were working on as well. So -- those ASX continued to be released during the year, which was cash expressed luxury line and also the Dragon Link 90,000 jackpots. So continue to see those products being released. So my view is that we haven't finished penetration of [indiscernible] in the Australian marketplace. And we've got a portfolio of games, which were released AGE that were seen to be a highly high-performing series of games. Having an earth, which was launched in mid-October is performing very well. It's got strong demand to support that. So we expect to continue to be able to run in that sort of range of share in the Australian marketplace from both a content point of view and also from a hardware point of view.

So I feel confident around that. Around the comment around North America, I think you're talking outright sales, was that correct?

Yes, because the ships is in and [indiscernible].

Yes. We finished the half at about 1.2% -- sorry, finished the year at 31.2%, which is the first time that Aristocrat has shipped more than any manufacturer in North America. So -- of the top 5 manufacturers, we had the higher shipments of game sales products in North America, and that's the first time we've achieved that. So on a year-over-year basis, we were 5.5% up on the previous year. and the market was actually flat. I do believe that the team again is executing very well there. There's an element of adjacencies in there. But if you look at the core business, strong growth from a gaming operations point of view, and our ASP is largely held as well. So from a wallet share point of view, well over 31% from that perspective.

Will we continue to lift it, again, coming back to performance. When you look at Spooky Link to the top 3 games in the outright sales list from [indiscernible] perspective, greatplacestart and another portfolio of games. We're very happy with our response from operators at the G2E this year and felt that it was a great indicator to -- remain confident about our pipeline in '26 for game sales and for -- sorry, for gaming operations.

Your final question on online, you're correct. We launched 74 games. We made 92 games. We have had challenges in getting gains into the market as it's more complex release process. I think it's fair to say that we're not targeting a 250, 300 game release. We are more interested in the quality of games. And if you look at our share, which has doubled from March this year to September were effectively doubled and that has really been driven by fewer games but higher quality. And we believe that high-quality land-based content will resonate and be more attractive to our operators and will actually be more attractive to the players. So our objective is to release high-quality land content into that market. And I think the proof is in the pudding in what we've been able to do with product maintenance over the last decade as we've taken land-based content and now are the #1 social slot share in the social casino market. So I believe that it's -- it's under our expectations to publish 74. We did say 90. We have made more than that number, and we'll look to be able to publish that noting we did go into Delaware and Connecticut after the end of the financial period. So we still have 2 more states to enter in North America as well.

Our next question comes from David Fabris from Macquarie.

Sally. If we stick with Interactive, can we just confirm that the technology integration is fully completed there, and there's nothing holding you back in that business. And then as part of that question, I appreciate you spoke about the quantum of game launches just now. But maybe can we talk about when some of the higher-performing games that are coming out, Maybe some of [indiscernible] games? Because I would assume that would support a significant step-up in market share?

Yes, sure. Thanks, David. Yes, when you're involved in technology, you're always investing to upgrade your technology, and we referenced the point that we continue to invest in product and technology that investment is across the organization and getting the streamlining of our ability to make games and distribute it across multiple channels. The fact that we're continuing to increase invest in technology will continue. When you think about each iLottery contract that we achieve is a new opportunity to invest and to drive strong long-term returns for the group. So we will continue to invest in technology, and that will benefit across the group, but it also does create the opportunity, particularly in the iLottery -- I'm sorry, in the Interactive business to support our longer-term growth aspirations.

So we're not fully completed. And I think every time we see a new opportunity, we will take the opportunity to invest for growth as we have with adjacencies in our gaming business. and the way that we've added adjacencies to continue to drive growth from our organic investment in the organization.

On the games release basis, we will be bringing Lightning leak to the market in FY '26. It is currently planned to be coming out in the calendar year of 2026. So it will be up middle of next year. That will be our first, if you like, iconic land-based game, not first, but it's our biggest iconic land base going to come to that market. There are a pipeline of games that come in behind that as well, and we'll continue to build those out. And that's where -- back to my earlier point, it's about the quality of games that will be released in interactive as opposed to the quantity of games that will be released and we also feel that that's a good way to work with our partners, particularly the land-based operators with the digital footprint to be able to offer games from their land floor, the retail floor into the online environment as well.

Yes. I guess my question is, why is there a 6-month delay in launching Lightning? Why can't you go today? Why do you have to wait to mid-2026.

The games, just the same as when you make a game for Queensland and you take it to New South while it's under different regulations, different structure the game has to be made. Therefore, that's part of the investment in technology is to streamline that over time. And the games have a different game, different play. It's not the same memory structure. It's not the same size game you have to take out graphics, you have to take out various aspects to it to make it applicable employable on a mobile device. So -- it is a reconfiguration of a game, and it's the same that would happen with anyone that's moving games from social iGaming or from gaming from gaming to get to an iGaming environment. So that what investors [ are looking ] over the last couple of years is to streamline that with GDK and tools for our teams at a more efficient way.

Got it. Understood. And can I just ask a question about how the business is utilizing AI, I guess, in particular, within D&D I'm wondering that if you're getting some efficiencies and gains in there, whether the growth of D&D may slow in out of years or whether we should be extrapolating that mid-single-digit growth rate beyond FY '26.

Look, we've tried to help guide to the mid-single-digit growth rate because if you look at that, that's actually a more applicable way to think about the way that we've invested behind D&D across the group now. we've structured the organization where product and technology is a group solution and that we make these solutions across the organization and then we plan to commercialize it in various structures.

We've also now put in place the portfolio planning to do that as well. As far as line goes, we're working on it in a number of areas. We mentioned where we are in product madness with art and our generation also with live ops. In the digital -- in the technology piece, it's around quality. It's also around how do we test our quality on a real-time basis to reduce quality and time to make games and also around porting of games so how we move games from market to market. So we are using these tools.

They're proprietary within our organization, and we continue to focus on that. And we see it as a way to continue to evolve our game porting and game efficiency. It will not take away from the creativity of games. It will not take away from how we make a game, but it will help us to be more efficient in the way that we move games across our portfolio.

[Operator Instructions]

Our next question comes from Andre Fromyhr from UBS.

Just, I guess, coming back to the -- a couple of questions we've had on gaming ops and the outlook. More specifically, I was interested in the role that MONOPOLY will play in that over the next 12 months. So you launched at G2E, but if I understand correctly, you can't be putting that on floors until the new calendar year. So what's been the reception so far? Are you getting indications from operators that already have monopoly licensed content on their floors about swapping over to the Aristocrat product?

Yes. Thanks, Andre. So we released it for showing it at G2E. So that was the MONOPOLY Big Board [indiscernible], which is our first game in the Class III MONOPOLY portfolio. We actually can't start placing that until the new calendar year under the contract with Hasbro. So we are continuing to build momentum around the brand. We had excellent feedback from D2E from customers who came back many times to look at the product and share it with their teams. There's also a Class II version, which will come up and come out shortly after that. And then there'll be other games that will roll out in FY '26 as well.

So we are in the transition period at this point in time. The contract with the current licensee expires at the end of this calendar year. And then from next calendar year, we can continue -- we can start placing it. So our feedback at this point in time from operators is that they are excited by the product.

They thought it was a very innovative way to bring contemporary maths to a really relevant gaming floor and they thought that the way it was integrated, it was a great experience. So we're very happy with the way MONOPOLY has showed been shown at the show and excited by what it will do in 2026.

Could you give any sense of scale of the role that MONOPOLY would play in your net installs for next year?

Not at this stage. We know what the installed base roughly is out there at the moment, which I won't take as it's not our installed base, but we see it as an opportunity to replace that installed base over the '26 period and also to be incremental to our existing installed base given that we don't have a card-based -- sorry, a game-based theme in our portfolio of gaming operations. So we have many other things. We don't have a game-based theme, and this is one that exists in the gaming market for a number of years.

Our next question comes from Liam Robson from Jarden.

Just first thing on me on gaming ops. I'm just keen to understand how you look to balance fee per day growth with net store growth. I'm just conscious, obviously, it was a tale of 2 halves for a day and then it was essentially the opposite for net installs with the softer second half.

Yes. Thanks, Liam. Look, I think the way we go to look at this is that there's an element of GGR, which influences fee per day because around 2/3 of the portfolio is on a participation model. So GGR will have some impact on that for the whole industry from that perspective. The way that we improve fee per day is through mix, so better MSPs, higher-performing games different mix within the portfolio. And so that's the important way of doing it.

And the other part is taking control of our commercial terms, which we did in the second half. So I feel that our fee per day improvement is good. As I said, it was supported by a couple of those metrics, and we are taking proactive steps in rebuilding the portfolio, particularly around and also enhancing the execution of our gaming ops as well.

Maybe just in terms of, I guess, taking control of your commercial terms, any impact there in terms of the softer second half net in stores?

No, nothing at all. Nothing at all. We were still able to place but still able to work with our customers and increase our installed base, particularly in new openings. It didn't impact that at all.

Okay. Great. And then just maybe secondly on capital management. obviously, net debt to EBITDA only 0.2x 80% through the buyback. To me, it looks like you've got close to $4 billion of headroom to the midpoint of your gearing range on an FY '26 basis. I mean I'm conscious of your comment of not getting back there without material M&A. But is there any reason we shouldn't be thinking about further buybacks alongside M&A moving forward?

Yes. I think -- thanks for the question. Our capital allocation strategy has actually got buybacks and well embedded in there now. We've been doing buybacks for a couple of years. And we've been clear that that's part of our ongoing strategy. So you can absolutely expect us to continue to do buybacks.

And we obviously announced a new program back in February. We're 77% of the way through executing on that. So yes, it's absolutely part of our ongoing strategy to help manage our balance sheet and obviously return to shareholders. I mean, this year, we returned a total EUR 1.4 billion across buybacks and dividends, and it's certainly to our intent to keep elements and go forward.

Our next question comes from Kai Erman from Jefferies.

Obviously, you had a pretty decent earnings due to the second half this year. and Trevor, I think you made a comment earlier, do you expect that into '26 as well. I'd just be keen to kind of see where you're seeing that deficiently and what the specific drivers of that are?

Yes. Thanks, Kai. I mean if you look at our historical profile, we've generally been weighted in the second half as a rule. So it's not an unusual profile for us to be normally weighted for the second half. largely, that comes off the back of games and gaming operations going into the installed base post G2E and obviously gain releases in the first quarter, second quarter of the year. So it's not unusual for us to be skewed to the second half.

Some of those second half opportunities will also be because of the interactive business as we see 2 lotteries coming online in July being Michigan and Massachusetts. So there will be some momentum from that perspective. But it's not an unusual profile for us to be phased in the second half of the year on the way that games are released post G2E games are placed post G2E and the momentum with the seasonality of the industry as well.

All right. And then just a follow-up. I guess in North American outright sales looked strong when you consider the adjacency mix. Taking out the adjacencies, what are you sort of seeing the pricing trends there? Do you sort of expect a sustainable pricing increase throughout FY '26 as well?

I wouldn't say sustainable pricing increase. But first of all, I appreciate the fact that you recognize that the negative draw on adjacencies is from an ASP point of view, why we put that down to hardware being the new barren orchard cabinet and also high-performing games like [indiscernible] where high-performing games support a premium price. And the new hardware has been very well received. It's not a case of pricing up because we can. It's about a value solution for our customers and high-performing games on new hardware, which is working is a great return for our customers.

Our next question comes from the line of Rohan Sundram from MSC Financial.

I'll ask you the, a last one, Trevor or Craig, actually, on the landbased side of things, how would you rate your forward visibility at this point in time? And just how would you describe the overall state slots CapEx at the moment from customers.

Yes. Thanks, Rohan. Look, I think we're very happy with the visibility of the market at this point in time. Performance of our portfolio is strong. hardware configurations are very good and the ability to see both new openings and expansions, which we anticipate is going to be around about the same size as '25 and '26. We've got line of sight to those and we feel very competitive around our ability to take a good share of those new openings and expansions. So a visibility point of view, I think where we were at the half, there was still a lot of volatility in the market, uncertainty around tax changes, regime, regime tax changes and other changes in the market, and that has settled down now. And I think operators have been willing to invest in game placement, and we were able to take advantage of that through the second half.

So I feel confident about our visibility. I feel confident about our momentum into this year. And October, as I said, I feel good for what I'm seeing in October that '26 is in good shape.

Our next question comes from Sam Bradshaw from Evanson Partners.

Just wondering how you're seeing current M&A opportunities and which segments you'd be most interested.

Yes. Thanks, Sam. Appreciate the conversation. A couple of points here. We're still working on integrating NeoGames. We've done a lot of work there, and we've reorganized the product and tech side of things as we spoke about a number of times now. And Neo is very much part of the risk crack group, and we're continuing to leverage that opportunity. I would point to a couple of small tuck-ins that we've done, which to me are about building the investments for the future. One of those was MTS BBs which is really around creating connectivity, real-time connectivity between gaming machines and the operators to allow direct marketing, et cetera.

And the second one was a wager which is a streaming business, very small streaming business that is starting to emerge in the North American and Canadian markets. We closed that on the fifth of November. So there are just a couple of small bolt-ons that continue to enhance our strategy. As you know, we use M&A to accelerate our growth, not to replace organic growth and share taking.

As far as the future goes, we feel pretty well placed with our gaming portfolio of assets at this point in time and see that we can continue to take share rather than buy share through acquisition in the gaming space. Social Casino and online. As you know, we've streamlined our portfolio. Our portfolio of social casino assets continue to be strong with NFL being the latest new app, but continuing to leverage the Evergreen is critical there. And then we would look at areas in Interactive space as well that would be attractive, but would have to accelerate our Interactive position.

So we continue to participate in the markets and monitor those things that are strategically aligned to our objectives and remain disciplined around what is appropriate for our company. And as we said, we're building. We have built the capability to do this, and we've built the financial structures to support it as well.

Great. If I've got time to squeeze in a follow-up. Can I just ask whether you plan on entering tradable gaming, either organically or via M&A?

We look at all of those things, Sam, to be honest with you. We continue to look at all markets and where we're focusing at the moment is on what we've got in front of us and leveraging the scale of the organization, but we look at all markets.

I'm showing no further questions. Thank you all very much for your questions. I'll now turn the conference back to Trevor for his closing comments.

Thanks, operator. Aristocrat continues to deliver strong performance in line with our strategy of maintaining a diversified gaming portfolio that capitalizes on our market-leading content and capabilities. Our ongoing commitment to invest in talent, technology innovation underpins our confidence in capturing the many opportunities that lie ahead. And again, this year, we've taken market share in every market that we participate in, feeling confident going into '26 as well.

Should you have any further questions or queries, please feel free to contact our Investor Relations team. I'll now bring the formal proceedings to a close. And on behalf of the entire Aristocrat team, thank you for your continued interest and support, and we wish you all a pleasant day. Thank you.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect your lines.