By Andrew Starke
Aristocrat Leisure has announced profits of $54.6 million for the 2010 full year and says its turnaround program is on-track to deliver growth in 2011.
The operating profit was down from the $116.4 recorded for 2009 but in-line with its November guidance to the market.
Aristocrat revealed that 2010 had been a challenging year for the group but added that the business was only 18 months into a five-year turnaround program to deliver a sustained improvement in performance.
Significant headwinds, including the generally weak market conditions and ongoing strength of the Australian dollar, dampened reported results for 2010.
CEO and managing director Jamie Odell said he was encouraged by the progress the company had seen in these markets where it has delivered new generation games and more competitive products with state of the art technology.
”Our impressive widescreen innovation in North America helped the group achieve value and share growth in the outright sale segment in 2010, despite a double-digit fall in overall demand,” he said.
“The fee per day performance of our new gaming operations products is also very encouraging, and significantly ahead of the average fee per day performance of our legacy products.
“Portfolio quality is key to performance improvement. As a result, we expect to continue to see faster progress in those markets such as North America where our turnaround program is more advanced, than Australia and Japan.”
Shares in Aristocrat have rallied since the announcement and were trading at $3.26 at 1pm today (Feb 25), up from $3.04 seven days ago.