With a $1.3b global profit and $151.4m profit in Australia and New Zealand, Aristocrat Leisure’s 2022-2023 financial year results show a year of growth for the wider group, and stability within the Australian market.
In an address to the shareholders, Aristocrat Leisure chairman Neil Chatfield outlined the drivers of the group’s success.
“Aristocrat’s performance underlines the ongoing and effective implementation of Aristocrat’s growth strategy. Throughout the year, we continued to invest strongly in competitive product portfolios to drive further share growth across key segments. Strong performance in Aristocrat Gaming more than offset the impact of an industry-wide moderation in mobile game demand, again highlighting diversification and scale as fundamental strengths of our business,” he said.
The Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) segment made up 7.3 per cent of Aristocrat Leisure’s total revenue throughout FY23. The ANZ segment saw a revenue of $458.7m and a profit of $151.4m, a reduction of 0.4 per cent and 3.6 per cent respectively compared to FY22. The region’s profits were bolstered by the continued penetration of the MarsX cabinet, and despite the challenging operating market and regulatory uncertainty, the business showed resilience over FY23.
“The ANZ business retained its market-leading ship share, driven by the continued success of the Dollar Storm and Cash Express Luxury Line game families and the newly released Aqua Kingdom family,” Chatfield said.
Sustainability and social responsibility has been a key focus for Aristocrat Leisure.
“Across the year, Aristocrat made significant steps forward in delivering our ambitious sustainability commitments. Responsible gameplay remained Aristocrat’s highest sustainability leadership priority. Among other highlights, we completed Australia’s first cashless gaming trial, and post period end, Aristocrat submitted science-based emissions reduction targets for our global enterprise to the science-based targets initiative. We anticipate validation of these targets in the first half of calendar 2024,” Chatfield said.
Across the global business, the gaming machine portfolio performed well during this period.
“We continued to strive to be a partner of choice to our gaming customers, delivering a market-leading portfolio performance of 1.4 times floor average in the period,” Chatfield said.
The acquisition of NeoGames, an end-to-end online lottery and gaming provider, was announced in May 2023 and is expected to complete in early 2024.
“When combined with our leading gaming content and strong relationships with both commercial and tribal operators and gaming regulators, we believe the acquisition will allow us to build a world class online real money gaming company at scale, operating across the three main verticals of iGaming, iLottery and Online Sports Betting,” Chatfield said.
Additionally, significant investments into design and development place Aristocrat Leisure in a good position for further growth.
“Across the year, $820m was committed to market-leading design and development, further strengthening and broadening product portfolios,” Chatfield said.
Notably, this investment is an increase of 13 per cent from that FY22, whereas previous financial years saw increases in design and development investment of 11 to 12 per cent.
Additionally, efforts to increase the representation of women within the business have seen continued success.
“Aristocrat made further advances in lifting the representation of women, with the percentage of women on the company’s board increasing to 44 per cent, and over 45 per cent of the executive team, as at period end,” Chatfield said.