Afternoon and welcome to the Gaming Realms plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Mark Segal, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Thank you. Firstly, thank you everyone for dialing in and we'd like to take you through our FY 2025 results presentation. You have myself, CEO, Co-Founder of Gaming Realms, and Geoff Green, the CFO on the presentation today. I just thought I'd take you through sort of what we do and how we are generating this great growth we've seen in the last few years. We're a developer and licensor of casino games for the regulated iGaming market, international market that is. The majority of our revenue and our biggest IP comes through Slingo, which we acquired in 2015. We actually brought it to the iGaming market. Previously, it existed in the lottery market, the land-based casino market, social gaming market, et cetera. Very, very big important IP. We monetize mostly through real money.
We have a platform which hosts all of our games and connects to all the casinos that we work with around the world. And there's great volume in that, both in terms of transactions and players, and partners, and number of games. Also we operate a social publishing, social casino business, which essentially is a way of monetizing our Slingo games in another market. The way we are generating the business comes through three areas. The majority and the core parts of our business is the Content Licensing business. We have built up a portfolio of over 80 Slingo games, which are very unique in both format and the IP. The way we are paid is we share in the operator success. Essentially, the more revenue that our games produce for the operators, we earn a percentage of that. It's very diverse now, this stream.
We work with over 200 partners. We're in 30-odd regulated markets as well. We have a portfolio probably close to 100 games in total. As Slingo is such an important IP and a popular IP, we also are licensing this into other adjacent markets where we've not developed the project. You can buy Slingo scratch cards in the lottery market in the U.S., for example, and we also have licensed Slingo to social slot providers as well as online scratch cards and other areas as well. We have our Social Gaming business which is almost like a Candy Crush model where we get in-app purchases and some advertising revenue.
What I will note though for the Brand Licensing is that this revenue stream is as we do deals and is not necessarily as recurring, say as the Content Licensing side, albeit we're often renewing all these deals and they do work in a cycle. In the year we managed to renew our lottery deal as well as the social casino deal as well. Slingo is popular in really for a few areas and one of it is the brand itself, hence why we're able to license into all these other markets and have great success through our games.
The other is it's become a category in itself, and I don't know if you can quite see here, but these are some operators we work with in North America, and you'll be able to see that in DraftKings and BetMGM, we actually have Slingo sections on the site. They really stand out in the real estate of a mobile phone. Our Slingo content can be stand out and promoted. The one with FanDuel there is a big promotion they've done around our games, and they also have a place on their site for all Slingo content. Then on the right is a lottery we work with in Canada where again they promote Slingo separately. What we've done is we've managed to take Slingo to the iGaming market and then make it a category which stands alongside slot games, table games, bingo, et cetera.
We always market ourselves and are a premium supplier of games. Slingo is different and premium, and we work with some of the top operators all over the world. I mean, notable ones that we've gone live with during the period is BCLC, which is the lottery in British Columbia in Canada. We've gone live with Hollywoodbets in South Africa as well. We try and work with the biggest partners wherever we are, whichever markets we're in. We're growing. In the year we went live in Delaware in the U.S. U.S. being our largest market, and also went live with British Columbia in Canada. We've gone live with Brazil during the year and Peru since the year end as well. Brazil in particular is a new regulated market, and so we're navigating that, slowly rolling out our games, going live with new partners.
We went live in South Africa right at the end of the year, so we'll start to see the benefit of that into 2026 and beyond. Again, as we roll out with more partners and more games as well. We've gone live in a few more of the regulated markets in Africa. Again, we're at the beginning of our sort of journey in these new, really exciting markets for us. Then into Europe as well, there are more markets which are going to regulate in time. I think Ireland is one, for example, which has said it's going through a regulatory process at the moment, and these are new markets we'll be able to launch our content and essentially open up new revenue streams for our games. I'll hand over to Geoff now to run through the results for the year.
Thank you, Mark. I'll take you through our 2025 financial performance and the key drivers behind the numbers. I'll start here with some of our key metrics. At a headline level, as you can see at the top of the slide, we grew our revenue by 10% to GBP 31.4 million over 2024, and we grew Adjusted EBITDA 15% up to GBP 15 million, reflecting the continued scale and strength of the model. As the bottom of the slide shows, North America continues to be a key driver behind this growth. Our growth in the regulated U.S. markets was 23% and in Canada was 31%, both in constant currency. The region now represents 63% of Content Licensing revenue. This financial performance is underpinned by what we're seeing operationally. We've continued to grow the number of operators that we distribute to.
With the 40 new partners that we launched with in 2025, our distribution base now exceeds 250 partners. We're continuing to go live into new markets. With the seven markets that we entered during 2025, including Brazil, South Africa, and Switzerland, and then the four markets that we've gone live with in the first quarter of 2026, that brings us to 32 markets that we currently distribute our content to. We also increased the number of games that we've launched across our core Slingo portfolio, our bespoke titles, and the third-party titles that we distribute. Player engagement across our portfolio is also up. We saw a 22% increase in the number of unique players compared with 2024. Encouragingly, we've seen this momentum continue into 2026 so far.
Our Content Licensing revenues in January and February 2026 were 8% ahead of the same months in 2025, or 10% on a constant currency basis. Now turning to the financials. This slide shows our summary income statement for the year. Revenue growth was again driven by our core licensing business, where revenues grew 13% year-over-year. While we reported growth in our Content Licensing business of 3%, that would have been 5% under constant currency, with currencies being a headwind for us during the year, particularly with the U.S. dollar. As we'll come onto in a couple of slides' time, that growth was also impacted by our U.K. revenues following the introduction of staking limits in April. Then just a few other points to highlight from this slide.
We continue to operate a high margin model, which is one of the bits that gives us the operational leverage. Variable costs represent 20% of revenue. Our admin expenses increased as expected, reflecting the targeted investment in our development team for our future growth. Importantly, we maintained strong cash conversion with GBP 9.5 million of underlying cash inflow, which represents 63% of Adjusted EBITDA. Let me now turn to cash generation and capital allocation. This slide shows how we've deployed that cash generated during the year. We took a balanced approach between returning capital to shareholders and investing in the future growth of the business. During the year, we returned GBP 2.8 million to shareholders via share buybacks as part of an overall GBP 6 million program that was announced.
The remaining GBP 3.2 million of that program was completed in the first quarter of 2026, alongside the announcement of a further GBP 5 million buyback. We also increased our capital investment by GBP 2.5 million to grow and scale our content capabilities, the benefit of which will come in 2026 and beyond, and we'll discuss this later in the presentation. Even after these items, we still reported GBP 4.3 million of net cash increase during the year. Overall, we're growing, we're funding that growth ourselves, and we're still returning capital to shareholders at the same time. That leaves us with GBP 17.8 million of cash at the year-end, giving us significant flexibility moving forward. This is staying with cash. This is just another slide that shows a slightly different way of how that GBP 4.3 million of reported cash increase came about.
It starts with GBP 8.8 million of profit before tax on the left-hand side and kind of shows the bridging steps to go from that to GBP 4.3 million on the far right-hand side. The main movements here are GBP 8.2 million of capital investment and GBP 2.8 million return to shareholders that we spoke about on the previous slide, alongside the non-cash charges, the amortization charge, depreciation, and the share-based payment charge, and then the tax paid during the year on the right-hand side. We delivered GBP 4.3 million of free cash flow even after the increased investment and shareholder returns and ended the year with GBP 17.8 million of cash. Now, what really underpins this is the strength of the underlying model, which this slide summarizes.
In very simple terms, what this is saying is as we grow our distribution by going live with more partners and entering more markets. And as we launch more games, and as those games gain engagement, that drives higher gameplay across our portfolio, higher bets placed, and ultimately revenue for the business. I'll show on this next slide how that translates into the key metrics. This slide shows the progress we've made since launching the licensing business in 2017. The top two charts here show the cumulative growth in operators and the number of games, with over 250 partners, and 107 games live by the end of 2025. The bottom two charts show the growth in bets and revenue across that same time period. I would say the bottom two charts are both in-period metrics, whereas the top two are on a cumulative basis.
Looking at the bottom left chart, that shows that in 2025 alone, over GBP 7.4 billion worth of bets was placed across our portfolio, which really shows the scale that the platform is now operating at. As our agreements are performance-based, that growth in bets feeds through to increased revenue, as shown in the bottom right slide. As I mentioned a few slides back, that momentum has continued into 2026, so we're looking forward to seeing these charts continue to progress over the coming periods. I'll now break down that growth by geography. Starting with the U.S. on the left-hand side, revenue grew by 19% or 23% in constant currency. That growth has come about from a number of factors.
We saw strong underlying performance and growth in all of our existing markets, where every state or every existing state grew at double digits over 2024. We launched some very strong U.S.-focused titles during the year, which our U.S. players really engaged with. We also launched another tranche of bespoke content for our largest U.S. partners, and we went live in Delaware during the year. The sixth state that we distribute our content to, and had the full year impact of going live in West Virginia during 2024. I would just say West Virginia and Delaware are very much smaller revenue territories for us. Moving to the right, the U.K. revenue declined by 10% during the year compared with 2024, reflecting the impact of staking limits introduced in April.
We'll come onto a case study on the next slide, showing how we've mitigated and grown the U.K. market subsequently. Canada, moving along to the right again, delivered strong growth, up 26% or 31% in constant currency. Growth here was supported by going live in British Columbia during the second quarter of 2025. Launching with six new partners in Ontario, and also seeing strong organic growth with the existing partners we were live there with. In Italy, we also saw strong growth, albeit from a smaller base there, growing 31%. Towards the end of 2024, we launched our first Italian title, where we licensed in a top Italian slot brand and built a Slingo game around. That game has really driven engagement in the market. The game actually did fantastically well globally, not just in Italy.
Then finally, the rest of the world on the far right-hand side. The rest of the world declined year- on- year, mainly due to two markets, Portugal and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the recent regulatory changes, so the higher taxes, the deposit limits, and the marketing restrictions have led to a material contraction in the regulated market size, which we are downstream from. In Portugal, while we are live, the regulations in that market mean we can only have a very limited number of titles. Without that regular flow of new content, it's very difficult to maintain or grow revenues there. I'll now hand back to Mark just to talk a little bit about our U.K. recovery.
Yeah, I just want to talk about this because the U.K. has always been a growth market for us and was traditionally our largest market, albeit the U.S. and then North America as a whole has overtaken it anyway, where there's very big growth. Last year, the new regulations came in at the beginning of April, which actually was a number of regs across the board. The one which affected us most was the staking limit. Our games generally are low staking, or the transactions are low staking within games. We are a multi-staking game and the flow is affected by the staking limits. We tested two different mechanics on how we could work within the staking limit, which we tested at the end of 2024. Unfortunately, even though we knew staking limits were coming in, we only had six weeks.
It was a rolling six-week notice period. Even though we developed the tool, we then had to go through the licensing or the certification process for all our games and backdating them, which took time. Q2 last year, we dropped 21% and you can see that steadily started to grow. At Q3, we were probably 11% or 12% down then into Q4. In December, we had a great month. It was new content launches, more volume. As we went on, we went from 16 games with this tool to over 50 by the end of the year. That's really helped. The base here, just to explain what's 100%, was the six-month period before the staking limits came in. Essentially from October 2024 through to the end of March 2025. December performed above that.
We've actually seen growth in the first quarter of 2026 versus the first quarter of 2025, which was pre-staking levels. We've been able to maintain this performance in the U.K. It's a really good testament to, A, the popularity of games, B, how these games work, even with restrictions in place. And the innovation that we put into these games and the execution, essentially working through the regulations, certification, and with the operators to get the games back live and marketed again. Actually, a shame that we had this bump in the year, which we talked about after the first half of last year, but the recovery's great. We do have the taxes coming in. Well, they came in last week, essentially for the remote gaming duty increase in the U.K., and we will work through that again, hopefully as successfully as we've done now.
This slide shows what happens when we go live with a cohort of operators each year. I would say the numbers here represent the gross revenues that the operators generate from our games. If you look at the 2025 stack on the far right-hand side, that shows that the operators or all our partners generated in excess of GBP 350 million in gross revenue from our portfolio last year. Each color within those stacks represents a different cohort of operators that we've launched with. If you look at the 2021 stack and the gray sliver at the top, that shows that the operators that we went live with during 2021 generated, I think it was GBP 18 million of gross revenue from our games.
That then subsequently grew to GBP 62 million, GBP 73 million, GBP 80 million, and then GBP 101 million last year, showing how we scale and build with our partners over time. I would say that there's a couple of the earlier cohorts, so 2018 and 2020 in particular, they are the cohorts where we went live with some of our largest U.K. partners. There is a small contraction in 2025, and that's just reflective of the previous slide around decline in the U.K. in 2025. The key point here is when we go live with an operator, we don't just launch our full portfolio of games on day one. We grow with our partners over time as we launch more content, deepen relationships, understand their player base, and drive engagement.
The model really grows in two ways, by layering on new operators each year and then through existing operator cohorts continuing to scale over time, as this chart demonstrates. Finally from me, I just wanted to talk a little bit about 2026 and expectations, because this is an area where context is important. The consensus for 2026 is for GBP 14.7 million of Adjusted EBITDA, which is slightly below the GBP 15 million that we've just reported for 2025. However, this small change is due to the U.K. tax change that Mark has just spoken through, where Remote Gaming Duty increased from 21%- 40% last week. What this table is trying to do is show what 2025 would have looked like had that tax mechanism been in place for the full year.
That middle column shows that 2025 reported revenues would have reduced by GBP 2 million and Adjusted EBITDA would have reduced by GBP 1.7 million- GBP 13.3 million. On a pro forma or like-for-like basis, we would still have been growing double digit Adjusted EBITDA from pro forma 2025- 2026, showing there remains strong underlying growth in the business.
Okay. Just take on, we want to invest to growth opportunities for the business. This has been our performance in the regulated iGaming market in North America, since we went live there in 2017. You can see, particularly in the last two periods, we've started to grow or we've continued, every market that we're in is still growing. Each time we go live with a new market, it's layering on top. We've seen really, really good performance in the last year in these markets in North America. We've added British Columbia, Delaware, and West Virginia in the last year or so, but we're still seeing growth in the ones we have. That's come from the content that we are launching in the market. We actually had our biggest ever launch last year from one of the games we released, and we expect this to continue into future years.
As more states open, they will layer on top. We have great relationships with the operators as well. These markets are still growing, and we tend to track either in line or above the market growth as well. We will continue to see growth in these markets as well as the expectation or the aim from ourselves that we will start to take market share as we innovate our product and take more product to market as well. This is some research on the U.S. market and where it could go. The base case here, which is the lighter blue, is the predicted growth, essentially with no new states regulating through to 2029, and it's still expecting there could be up to 60% or 62% growth in the markets we're in already, and we should at least perform as well as that.
Then the bull case is if we have a couple of significant states or decent sized states launching in 2027 and then in 2028, and it can show the potential of where the addressable market could go for us with more states regulating. This is still fairly prudent. We may still only have 10 states live by the end of 2029 and double the addressable market for us. Geoff spoke a little earlier about the investment that we're doing into more content and games for our business. This is in four areas really. We are building now more Slingo games than we've done previously. 2025 was at the previous levels of one a month. We should start to see from 2026, and then once we have a full cadence from 2027 onwards, we'll be launching more Slingo games, and the investment started in the year- end 2025.
We're also having a lot of success now building more localized and bespoke content, on top of the core roadmap, Slingo roadmap with our partners. We very recently launched a Slingo Golden Lucky Pants with Paddy Power. We've launched an NHL game in the U.S. with one of our partners, as well as lots of sports brands. We're starting to see how this is helping us with our, essentially attracting more players to Slingo who love the games. We've also just launched our first couple of games from a new internal studio that we've been growing called Lucky Lunar. These are more traditional type of games, slot games, table games, but they will bring in some Slingo IP to them. We are innovating here.
We're looking at ways we can bring Slingo into a wider portfolio of content, which will attract more players to the Slingo IP, and hopefully they'll cross-sell and play more of our games. What we have found with Slingo is that most of the players who play three Slingo games. They try most of the new games which come out. Some very recent research I've seen that we are one of the largest family of games in the iGaming space. We're a top five family now, Slingo, in the U.S. market. The more we can do around Slingo, I think the more we can start to take market share, attract more players to our games. The other area we've been growing is, as Geoff said, our platform has been able to scale seamlessly.
We had GBP 7.4 billion bet through the platform last year, and we've been taking other third-party, other proven studios games into our platform for distribution. We're plugged into 240-odd partners now, and we see an area where we can take other games and take some, essentially increase our margin take, and offering to more partners. We went live with our third partner, which was S Gaming in January, and that's launched well in the U.S. We're definitely seeing growth from that side of the business as well. A little bit on the bespoke part, the content we can see here, and some of it's local. ¡Allá tú! is Deal or No Deal for Spain. We have our NHL game, which we've done with FanDuel. We've got a game here with Paddy Power and also with bet365.
We're working with our largest partners to try and get some targeted content for them. Then some more in the U.S. market as well. We are doing more and more sports games now, which get promoted in stadium, as you can see on the right with the Detroit Red Wings hockey. We're also launching quite a few more of those. We did in 2025 and into 2026 as well. They're really popular. They work very well for the operators. The sports betting players love the Slingo games as cross-sell into the casino. We have a really good offering for that. Don't know if we can quite see it here, but I think on the left, the Phillies themselves have advertised the Slingo game to go and play at the casino, to play them.
We get real good interaction and support from the sports brands as well. I think that's it. Just a little bit more on the Brand Licensing here. We can just show the areas where it's gone. We've had so much in retail sales on the Slingo scratch cards. They're selling millions of these tickets every year. We've got Slingo in a bingo product, which we've licensed it to a big operator to build. There's a slingo.com portal, which another operator is operating on behalf of us as well. We're doing more. I think there'll be more opportunities here. Definitely more demand for sure, and it's just a matter of seeing how Slingo can incorporate into the right adjacent markets for us.
I think as we get time and scale, we may look to execute some of these ourselves as well, because I think it's an area where we can bring our own sort of way of bringing Slingo into new markets. I think that's it for the slides.
That's great. Thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up you at the end.
Great. Do you want to?
Yeah, I can take a couple. We've had a couple of pre-submitted questions on our capitalizations. The first one is, can you give some guidance on CapEx spend for FY 2026 and beyond? Can you explain why CapEx increased so much in 2025? And is it likely to keep on increasing indefinitely? I think we've covered the majority of that through the presentation where we're investing across Slingo, Lucky Lunar, bespoke, aggregation. CapEx spend did increase 45% in 2025 compared with 2024, which reflects all of those investments and increasing the future content pipeline and what we can deliver to market in future years. In terms of outlook, I wouldn't expect that increase to continue at that rate. I think for 2026, I think we're realistically looking at something mid-teens growth, which would just be reflecting the full year impact of this increased investment.
Which happened towards the start of 2025. Then it will kind of normalize around that level as we get to our content flow position. Then there's another one on tax, complicated . The tax situation looks incredibly complicated. How should investors understand it? I guess you're right. The tax, how we presented tax over the last few years has been complicated, but it's mainly because as we've become profitable, we've been recognizing deferred tax assets on our historic losses and then subsequently using them. Then we also implemented a new, more efficient tax structure midway through last year. I guess the message would be we're kind of through all that. By the end of 2025, we had used all of our available U.K. tax losses and the new structure is in place.
I think on a forward-looking basis for 2026 and beyond, an effective tax rate of the U.K. standard of 25% is where I would point people towards.
Yeah, we're jumping around, as the questions come in, but there was a question on why aren't the brokers conducting the buyback to the maximum, I guess, the parameters they can use or the maximum amount. We are speaking to them, and we're satisfied the buyback is progressing in line with the objectives of the program and within the price and volume limits that have been agreed. There is some nuance, I think, around the liquidity at the time and the more safe harbors on the price and of the independent trades and stuff as well. We are working with them and trying that it's executed as best as possible. Just moving on. There's a question on Brand Licensing revenue, because we saw a lot of growth in 2025.
I talked about a couple of brand deals that we've done, but the question here is can we help investors understand the nature of the deals? Are there upfront payments? Are there multi-year rights? Critically, the baseline. I think they're all accounted slightly differently. The ones which have, in this case, was a upfront amount. It was a continuation of a license and an MRG. It's a five-year deal, we're hoping it will recoup and we'll earn some additional revenues during the deal itself, albeit we've had to account for it all upfront under the IFRS. We have some other deals which are more baseline, which are monthly ones with some more performance targets on them.
I think we would expect the licensing to fall probably more in line with what we saw in 2024, we'll see in 2026, rather than this big spike that we saw in 2025. Another question is North America remains your largest market at 63% of the Content Licensing and growth was 19% in 2025, having been 59% in 2024. Is that moderation purely a function of a higher base or are you seeing signs of saturation in the States? Well, I think we've probably showed you on the slides themselves, but it is a function, I think, of starting from a higher base. Sorry, this is a relevant slide here. We are still seeing growth in all the markets that we are in, and you can see in H2 of last year, it was actually large growth as well.
I think we are confident that we can continue to hopefully take some market share and with continued growth as well as the increase in the quality, I think, of the games which we are taking to the market now. There's another one. You launched 12 Slingo games in 2025, and the same number in 2024, but also establishing Lucky Lunar Studio for traditional slot content. Given that Slingo's Content Licensing growth is slated 3% in 2025, is the pipeline of new Slingo titles actually driving meaningful incremental revenue, or has it reached a saturation point? What I'll say here is that it is driving growth. We can see it in the U.S.
What we've had to overcome was that we had a big drop in our second largest market in the U.K. in the year, which has essentially made the growth look a lot smaller than it is outside the U.K. I think we've also working closely with our partners as well. I think Lucky Lunar. Well, I know Lucky Lunar did not go live in 2025, albeit the investment started. We'll start to see benefits of this content in the second half of this year, and then probably into the full year in 2027 as we start to have a portfolio of games we can work with. No, we're still seeing a lot of growth and excitement around our content. We are meeting our partners regularly who want more Slingo. We're the only Slingo provider in the market. We have this great IP.
We want to take it into different products as well, because we can attract more players. The actual core game, which we're constantly innovating different ways of the interaction within Slingo, is still really popular. It's exactly what our partners are wanting and engaging with us.
There's another one here. What was the U.K. and non-U.K. growth rate for 2025, and the same question for 2026 to date? I think as we talked about in the presentation, our U.K. revenues declined 10% over 2024 after the introduction of staking limits. For the Licensing segment, our non-U.K. revenue growth was 24%, showing how strong we're growing in our international markets. The post period, Mark Segal alluded to it earlier, so on a like-for-like basis, we're up in the U.K., low- single digits, percentage-wise growth over 2025. Outside of the U.K., we were up 10% on a reported basis, but that was 16% on a constant currency basis. A very quick one. What were the FY 2023 and FY 2024 equivalents of the GBP 9.5 million or 63% of Adjusted EBITDA to cash conversion you talk about?
2023 was an inflow of GBP 4.5 million, which was 45% of Adjusted EBITDA, and 2024 was a GBP 6.1 million inflow, which was 46%. That bumped up last year to the GBP 9.5 million and 63%, showing that cadence of growth that we're on.
I'm going to combine a couple of questions together. I can get them there. They're both essentially around the use of the cash that we're generating. One of them is around, is the buyback working, and would we consider a dividend? The other one being around the Board has mentioned evaluating acquisitions if suitable, so it's more around M&A. I'd say that we do sit down and look at whether the best way of investing either shareholder value or back in the business. Definitely in 2025, it was around the buyback and investment in more growth and product for growth, and 2026 has been that way. We will still look at or evaluate opportunities if we feel the right one is there for an acquisition. It could be a few areas.
It could be some really interesting IP again, like we've managed to find with Slingo, where we can take to market and grow a new line. Albeit that is we've not found anything quite suitable for that yet, which we think has the traction. It's worth noting that Slingo is going to be 30 years old this year, which also shows a longevity, why we don't feel we're anywhere close to a ceiling with what we can be doing with the Slingo IP and the areas it's been in. The other one is if we can find some, maybe not something unique like Slingo, but a really well-run business with good revenues and nice content, which we can take onto our platform and then distribute much wider.
So we can start to target that into some of the markets which are more important for us or help grow in new markets. Again, it's just about finding one which I think ticks those boxes, can integrate well, and can be accretive for our business as well. We will look at all of these areas together when we look at where we think is the most suitable times and places to be investing back our cash. Another one is, in the two-month post year-end, core Content Licensing was 8% ahead of the comparable period in 2025. That compares to 3% growth in 2025 itself. Is the acceleration driven by new market launches, increased activity with existing partners, or other factors? Is it representative of underlying trajectory you expect for the full year? Just putting the U.K. tax aside, the increase there.
The growth this year has come very much from the fact that we've got a little bit of growth in the U.K., and actually, if the new taxes weren't coming in, we'd see really good growth in the U.K. this year from where we're at. In the U.S., it's really where we've seen a lot of good growth, and the other is from working well with the partners we're working and getting great content to market. It's actually come from the activity with our existing partners at the moment. We've launched with a few more. We do have some interesting markets we've just gone live with. There's South Africa, the African markets. Hopefully, we'll look to do some more in South America as well. I think these will start to hopefully have a bit more impact into this year's numbers as well.
One of the reasons why we feel that this year we'll hopefully end the year with a more positive or more solid recurring revenues than we start the year, because we will have worked our way through what's going to happen in the U.K. with the increased taxes and managed to sort of grow or make up that difference, and then we can grow from that point towards the end of the year as well. I think I don't know if we've got time for one more. I'm just going to have a see if there's any we've missed. I suppose, no, I think we've covered most of it either now in the presentation or the QA. There's been a few duplicates there. I think we're sort of finished now through the Q&A part.
That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you carry from investors, and of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Mark, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah. Just firstly, thank you for your time and support for those who have over the period. I'd just like to say, I feel like we've ended last year and we started this year in a really good place. We're still growing, seeing great growth in our largest markets in U.S. and Canada. U.K.'s returned to some growth as well. But we're in a really, really nice position. We've got a strong balance sheet. We're cash generative. We're able to start to invest in new initiatives, which will have long-term growth for the business, whether it's more Slingo content, different type of content with Slingo IP in it as well. We're showing continued growth in the markets we're in, but also launching in new markets. I feel we're in a really exciting part of our business now to kick on. Thank you.
That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.