Good morning, and welcome, everyone. Thanks very much to those in the room who've joined us here in Sydney and to those in the webcast for dialing in. We're really happy that you can participate in this event today. I'm James Coghill, and I'm General Manager for Investor Relations at Aristocrat. Before we commence, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land upon which we meet today, the Gadigal clan of the Eora people, and we pay our respects to elders, past and present. So a quick reminder that the webcast is being recorded, and then we'll put that on our website later today. A few other admin items, our disclaimer, please note that in the pack, and some emergency procedures. My favorite slide, if anything does happen, you go out the back doors and just turn right.
Okay, so a little bit more about what we're going to cover today. I'll hand over to Trevor Croker, our CEO, shortly. He'll open the presentations, and then we've got the day divided into—or the morning, should I say, divided into two broad sessions. We'll cover product and D&D and online RMG. In the first session, we'll break for tea at 11:00 A.M., and then come back and do gaming and Pixel United. We've got two Q&A sessions, as you'll see, so there'll be ample time to put questions to the executives. So a little bit more about what we are hoping to achieve today. We'd like you all to leave with a much deeper and comprehensive understanding of the three core businesses in Aristocrat.
We're gonna be sharing a lot more on our strategy, our growth plans, our aspirations, particularly in online RMG, and doing a deep dive into our newest business, Aristocrat Interactive. We're gonna be hearing from five executives. So Trevor, Trevor Croker, our CEO, who many of you are obviously familiar with, as you are with Sally, our CFO. Sally's gonna be presenting on Pixel United. And another familiar face will be Hector, the CEO of our gaming business. And it's with great pleasure that I can introduce two new executives to you. Matt Primmer, some of you know Matt. Matt's our Chief Product Officer, and he was a recent appointment to the executive.
And then Moti Malul, the CEO of Aristocrat Interactive, and I'm sure many, many in the room are looking forward to hearing his insights into online RMG and hearing more about the businesses that he ran at NeoGames. Last comment from me is that we are only a month away from our previous results, so it's very much focused on strategy today. We haven't changed any of the outlook statements that we made at the result for financial 2024. So on that note, Trevor, I'll hand over to you.
Thanks, James. Well, thanks for the introduction, James, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to Aristocrat's 2024 Investor Day. My name's Trevor Croker, and we're looking forward to talking to you today about the transformational juncture that we're at at Aristocrat, and I'm excited about what we have to share with you today. So I'd like to give you as much opportunity as possible to hear from our leaders today around what is going on at Aristocrat, and also, I'll make some brief comments to open the day for you. So many of you will have read our or heard us express our values, which is to bring joy to lives through the power of play. We have now nearly 8,500 employees around the world that have that, that bring that to life every day.
Of that 8,500, 3,000 of those are in content and technology. So these are people that are working on the games and the content and the technology that drives our organization. And we are really a content at heart organization when you look at the content and technology teams that we have that delight our players every day. The word joy is also important because it speaks to the gameplay that is offered and enjoyed in a balanced and responsible way. Aristocrat is, by any measure, a global growth company. We have a track record of successfully growing through organic investment and by acquiring and integrating businesses. We've completed a handful of transformational transactions over the past decade.
The most recent of most of these have been centered around creating opportunities to leverage our great content across new or new adjacencies, channels, and market growth opportunity segments. These acquisitions have generated growth and sustainable competitive advantage, while also enhancing the group's scale, strategic capabilities, and resilience. Just one example, we acquired Product Madness in 2012 as a start-up mobile publisher. With the addition of well-known Aristocrat brands and content, along with disciplined investment and other capabilities, we've grown Product Madness to being a leading publisher in the social games genre. This speaks to how we use M&A and how we think about M&A in our business. More recently, we set up Anaxi as the third operating vertical, and with the addition of NeoGames, we established Aristocrat Interactive.
With Interactive now sitting alongside gaming, we believe we have a clear opportunities to lean into our strengths in the regulated gaming and slots. We recently announced a strategic review of the group's casual and mid-core gaming assets, which recognizes this and responds to our changing environment. Sally will address this more in more detail later. We now have three scaled and complementary verticals, all with global reach into large and growing addressable markets, in excess of $400 billion across the verticals. We may be leading provider of content in a number of these markets, but there are still large, untapped, adjacent markets and geographies where we only have emerging or no presence. You can see this very clearly from the estimates of the relevant TAMs and our current participation, as set out on this slide.
With our market participation around $140 billion GGR, of which we currently only capture around 5%. Even where we do have well-established market positions, we go to market every day to win share. This is core to the mindset and the culture of our leadership team. You'll hear this consistently across the course of this morning's presentations. This slide lays out the three established core elements of our growth strategy, and describes how we deliver superior long-term profit growth. Our starting point is investing and innovating to create the world's greatest gaming content at scale. Our commitment to leading levels of disciplined D&D and CapEx investment to support content development is unwavering. Alongside this, is our investment in talent and technology, which are improving both, speed and efficiency at which we can deploy content and leverage it across multiple markets and channels.
Next, we focus on growing and distributing our leading content, taking share wherever we compete, and reaching players wherever and whenever they play, including in existing and new adjacent segments. We identified online RMG as a large, attractive, adjacency, adjacent segment for Aristocrat's market-leading content. Today, Interactive is an established global operating business, including a leading position in iLottery. We also invested in differentiating enablers to help us achieve and accelerate our strategy. These include nurturing outstanding talent and strong customer partnerships, along with a compliance culture that underpins that's underpinned by a commitment to sustainability in our industry. Aristocrat also benefits from a strong and diverse mix of strategic skill sets, capabilities, and experience. Our executive steering committee reflects a mix of high caliber, homegrown talent, and talent recruited externally to execute Aristocrat's growth strategy.
We've also been making deliberate investments in relevant skill sets, such as data, technology, cybersecurity, IP, and government relations, to name a few. You'll be hearing from four of these executives today, many of you who have attended our ESG session in December, will have also heard from Natalie, Christie, and Tracey. I've never been more enthusiastic about the level of talent that we now have in this organization. It truly sets us apart, as well as it'll keep us working hard to attract and grow great talent going forward. Our long-term approach to everything we do at Aristocrat is reflected in our approach to sustainability, where we've made considerable progress in recent years, driving improvements and further lifting maturities across our organization as against our important priorities.
While today's focus is on online RMG and the operating businesses, you'll observe that sustainability and responsible gameplay will be common themes across the presentations. The results of our strategy and effective execution are clear and compelling. Since financial year 2018, revenue has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 12%, increasing over 75% from $ 3.6 billion - $ 6.3 billion in 2023, and we've gained share across all key segments in which we compete. We've lifted our gaming operations market share across the five largest players from 31% - 40% over the same period. Segment profits have grown at an 11% CAGR, increasing from $ 1.6 billion - $ 2.7 billion over the same timeframe.
This strong financial performance has been delivered through diverse economic conditions and some challenging global events, demonstrating the resilience of our group, and also allowed us to continue to fully fund our growth priorities. Our return on capital invested has also been consistently high over the period, recovering after the COVID years to around 30% in financial year 2023, 30% in financial year 2023. At the same time, we've returned over $ 2.2 billion of surplus capital to shareholders through dividends and on-market share buybacks. And we're very proud of the first half fiscal results for 2024, which show continued strong momentum and execution of our business. Across a range of measures, we have a history of at least doubling the value of the group every five years.
This remains an aspiration and focus for Aristocrat, regardless of the variability of the operating conditions we may experience in striving to grow consistently from year to year. Our success is also reflected in the share price outperformance, which we have delivered to you, our shareholders, over the period, more over the most of the periods since our listing. We hope today underlines our focus on delivering sustainable, superior shareholder returns for you going forward. I'd like to summarize by outlining Aristocrat's proposition for investors, which is the backdrop to what you'll hear today from the subsequent presenters. We have a track record of delivering high quality and sustainable NPAT growth over the long term. Aristocrat now offers exposure to three exciting segments of gaming entertainment, with all large addressable markets and at different stages of growth.
We are focused on taking share in our most attractive and material growth opportunities in each vertical. These opportunities start with great content that we know resonates across each of the, these verticals. These are expanded through technology, which enables us to distribute content across a growing range of channels, and improve speed and efficiency. Combined with the competitive advantages, such as our relationship with customers, superior commercial execution, we see continued opportunities for growth from both organic and inorganic opportunities across all three businesses. We're at a pivotal stage of our evolution. We're confident that our successful approach to continued delivering for continued delivering for shareholders and for other stakeholders, we have a strong track record of delivering growth and benefits that, that we believe the next chapter is our next opportunity for growth, and we've only just begun. I won't start singing.
On that note, I'll hand over to Matt Primmer, our Chief Product Officer, to talk to you about our product portfolio and strategy. Thank you, Matt.
Thank you, Trevor. Good morning. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Matt Primmer, Chief Product Officer for Aristocrat. It's my pleasure to be here today to present to you the Aristocrat Enterprise Product Strategy and Vision, which is the cornerstone of our organic growth and innovation, and a key area that we believe truly differentiates us from our competitors. But first, I guess a little about me. I don't know everybody. I joined Aristocrat 10 years ago. I've been in the gaming industry for 24 years. In January of 2020, I was appointed as the Chief Product Officer for the gaming division, which is our largest business unit, and then earlier this calendar year, I was promoted to Chief Product Officer for the Aristocrat Group, which corresponded with the elevation of this role to the executive team.
This underlines how central our product strategy is for the ongoing success of the company, and our desire to more effectively leverage our scale through increased coordination and collaboration across the business. I'd like to start by talking a little bit about where we've been and where we're going. In the past, we were somewhat siloed, especially when it came to our investment approach, and with strategies focused on individual business units and channels. Today, we are focused on shifting to a more comprehensive portfolio approach. While we're still relatively early in this journey, we have made significant strides, so let's delve a little into this transition. Previously, our design and development investments were segmented by business lines. This approach, while effective in some respects, limited our ability to see the bigger picture and leverage our scale and best practices across business units.
Now, we're moving to a unified view of D&D investment across the portfolio, including our games, our hardware, our technology, and our platforms. This holistic approach ensures that strategic priorities are aligned across the enterprise, that resources are allocated more efficiently, and overall improves our returns on investment in this important area. Similarly, we're moving from a channel-centric approach to portfolio decisions, where we used to design content with a single channel in mind, and at a later date, we would come back to leverage it across those channels. Now, we're moving to a highly coordinated enterprise-wide portfolio strategy, where we make channel decisions upfront and design products for multiple channels concurrently. Enabling this is a broader use of data, leveraging inputs from all segments rather than just one in that decision process.
However, perhaps the biggest enabler of this strategy is the investment that we've been making, and we continue to make, in technology. In the past, our technology infrastructure has been somewhat fragmented, limiting visibility, leading to capability gaps, and creating operating inefficiencies. Over the past few years, we've been consolidating our technology into a cohesive enterprise tech stack that provides increased visibility, enhances our agility and our efficiency, and then delivers speed to market by allowing us to design for multiple channels at once. Finally, we're leveraging AI internally in areas such as automation, personalization in social platforms and innovation, and driving significant process efficiency improvements. One example is in the porting of game artwork from one platform to another. Optimizing and redrawing art normally takes weeks, sometimes months. We found that by leveraging AI, we're seeing this reduced to just hours.
As with any technology utilized, we are highly focused on safeguarding customer and consumer data, and of course, strongly protecting our IP. In summary, the shift to an enterprise-level approach to product strategy represents a significant evolution in how we operate, allowing us to lean into our strengths, take advantage of our scale and growing capabilities, and optimize our returns to achieve greater overall success. While relatively early days, we're excited by the progress we're already seeing and expect to see greater benefits into the future. I'd now like to delve into how we execute on our product strategy. We believe that our people are our greatest asset. We start by attracting and developing the best product talent globally, and we invest behind their success.
We empower them with technology, we empower them with capabilities, and we create a culture that fosters innovation and excellence, enabling them to create the best gaming content. As you see, we have six core strategic pillars that enable execution. First, D&D is at the heart of our innovation. Our programs encourage creativity and experimentation, leading to groundbreaking products that set us apart in the market. I'll elaborate on this further shortly. Second, we equip our teams with the best and most advanced studio tools, enabling them to push the boundaries of what's possible. These tools enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and facilitate higher quality output. Third, we empower our studios with the autonomy that they need to thrive. This structure fosters a sense of ownership and accountability within those creative teams and studios.
We then balance this with a collaborative overlay to optimize sharing of best practices and learnings across the company. Fourth, we recognize that properly and competitively rewarding our talent is crucial. We further demonstrate our commitment to their success by rigorously protecting and defending the IP that they create, and providing increased opportunities for commercialization. Fifth, we utilize comprehensive and well-managed data analytics and insights to inform our decisions, drive efficiency, and uncover new opportunities, which I will touch on again a little later. Finally, but certainly not last, maintaining the highest standards of compliance, quality, and responsible gaming are non-negotiables. We have rigorous quality assurance processes in place to make sure that our products not only meet, but exceed industry standards.
By focusing on these core areas, we aim to create an environment where talent can flourish, innovation can thrive, and success can be sustained. Investment in D&D is central to this strategy. We invest at industry-leading levels, both on absolute dollar basis and as a percentage of sales, in order to deliver what we believe to be the world's best gaming content across a growing range of channels. As a result, we were able to develop and extend a portfolio of innovative, cutting-edge products and experiences that resonate with players and deliver performance for our customers. This not only strengthens our market position, driving sustainable growth and share gains, but drives value creation for all of our stakeholders. Providing a bit more insight into how we frame and direct our investment, we focus first on understanding the market landscape to identify opportunities.
Next, we develop robust business cases and financial projections for alternatives. Finally, we assess both strategic and operational impacts in order to prioritize and make choices on where to focus our efforts across the total portfolio, including overlaying both a global and local market perspective, so that we can craft strategies and to address opportunities across the board and leverage our scale across channels. And while we invest at leading levels, we are also highly focused on delivering proper return on investment and relentlessly analyze our ROI metrics to this end. Once our talent teams have created content, accelerating its distribution across channels has become a top priority. We have long leveraged our deep gaming IP catalog, which includes some of the most recognized and beloved titles in the industry, into Pixel United's Product Madness division, enabling our most popular and innovative games to reach a broader audience.
However, several years ago, we started leveraging Pixel United digital-first content and features in gaming as well, and more recently, we've added interactive to the mix. We expect to increasingly leverage content across all three of our segments going forward. This slide provides some examples of how we are achieving enterprise leverage. Buffalo is a prime example. This iconic title has been successfully distributed across all three of our channels, as has Timber Wolf and Mr. Cashman. Dragon Link and Lightning Link, both known for their engaging gameplay and player loyalty, are currently available through two channels, with plans to bring them to interactive in due course. These brands all had successful track records on their initial platforms, such that by making them available more broadly, we are able to reach a wider audience and allow players to engage with our brands in whatever format they choose.
In total, we are leveraging 52 of our gaming titles across other platforms, 49 of our Pixel titles, and 35 interactive titles, with interactive still being at an early stage. Going forward, we expect our investments in common tech stacks to further enhance our agility, enabling us to rapidly and efficiently deploy games across channels where appropriate. We should note that leveraging our content across channels not only creates synergies across our business units and enhances player engagement, but being able to design and see content commercialized across platforms creates additional opportunities and incentives for our creative teams as well. As noted previously, decisions about where to focus our efforts, portfolio construction, and channel strategy are informed by data and insights. Further, being able to bring insights to the table enhances our customer conversations and makes us a more valuable partner.
At the heart of our strategy is the player. Whether they are engaging with our slot machines, social casino products, or our gaming apps, we are making better use of the data generated to drive insights. We overlay these with our assessments of customer needs, which are then funneled into informed product strategy and ultimately, business decisions. Further, our ability to leverage data from across the global enterprise, both from a channel and market perspective, allows us to make better overall portfolio decisions. Strong data governance, privacy, and responsible gameplay considerations are foundational to this work, with clear policies, training, and protocols in place to ensure compliance with all of our obligations and commitments. On the next few slides, I'd like to walk through a few relevant case studies.
The first of these focuses on the NFL in gaming, and on how player insights helped identify and refine this breakout opportunity. Our initial insight was that as casinos in the U.S. opened up post-COVID, a younger male demographic was visiting casinos more than in the past, but they were mostly focused around the sportsbook. The challenge was whether we could provide a relevant slots offer for this incremental cohort. Leveraging the NFL brand, the most popular sports franchise in the U.S., was identified as a possible opportunity. While this sounded like a great idea, before investing in such a strategy, we needed to ensure that we validated the business case. Our objectives were threefold: identify and size the market opportunity, identify unique player segments, and then validate player interest. Let's delve into those details.
What we found was an NFL casino player, when surveyed, revealed that 2/3 of casino players were interested in playing NFL team slot games. Further, general player surveys and designated market analyses confirmed that the NFL is the preferred sports league among casino-related players. Our research further indicated alignment between the NFL teams and Aristocrat Gaming. This all indicated a potential opportunity. Next, we focused on understanding the unique segments within our player base. Through player surveys, we gained insights into market sizing and fan motivations, and this was crucial for tailoring our offerings to meet desires and expectations of our diverse player base. Finally, we validated these insights through in-person demonstrations. We found that fans particularly enjoyed the Select Your Team feature, reinforcing the game's appeal. This direct feedback was really instrumental in refining the game features and ultimately contributing to its success on the casino floor.
Our next case study focuses on the decision to expand the NFL into social slots. We employed a similar framework to the land-based organization to analyze this opportunity, again, identifying and sizing the market opportunities and validating player interest. We started by undertaking an extensive concept study, which revealed a strong overlap between NFL fans and social casino players, and further verified the NFL slots' broad appeal, resonating with 87% of NFL fans and emerging as a favorite among all player groups. This indicated a potential opportunity for NFL-themed social casino games. Our insight showed that players are not only enthusiastic about engaging with NFL-themed slots, but also prefer to connect with friends and family through these games. This social element is key to player engagement and retention.
From this engaged fan base, we identified a healthy cohort of active mobile slot players who might potentially download NFL slots. As our Product Madness team develops this unique product, they are leveraging the insights from the Aristocrat Gaming teams, in particular, collaborating with the gaming studios that develop the land-based games. We believe that this will enhance the chance of success. Our third case study tracks the Spark Flame brand family and demonstrates how customer insights were leveraged to sequence our product roadmap across channels. As you can see, our journey began with Product Madness, where in year one, Cash Spark was launched as a digital-first game. Based on its success, we leveraged player feedback and market insights to enhance those game features and released Cash Spark Extreme in year two.
Year two also saw us launch an iGaming version of the original Cash Spark in Interactive, leveraging the tech, talent, and mobile optimization capabilities of the digital-first game. The lower costs and similar form factors of these digital platforms allows for shorter development lead times and faster iteration when transitioning from social to iGaming and vice versa. Increasing efficiency and speed to market overall is a key element of this digital-first strategy. Now, in year three, we've extended the brand franchise further, introducing Magic Flame as another digital-first Product Madness release and extending and releasing Cash Spark Extreme in Interactive. Coming full circle, later in FY 2024, the Spark Flame brand enters the gaming portfolio, showcasing our ability to leverage brands and features from digital-first social casino games into the broader gaming market. I think the first ones went live on Monday, for those that are, keeping score at home.
By extending our IP across channels, regardless of its origin, we're able to maximize our brand recognition, optimize our return on investment, and provide players more ways to engage with our brands, and overall, capture the synergies inherent within our portfolio approach. So to summarize, D&D remains our top organic investment priority, and we are investing to take share and enter adjacencies across our portfolio, including in RMG. Our exceptional talent is at the core of everything we do, and we support them with enabling technologies, tools, and capabilities to optimize their success. We are increasingly leveraging our leading branded content across platforms and markets, achieving synergies and improved returns on investments across the portfolio, and we are investing in technology to enable the efficient and rapid distribution of our content across platforms at scale.
Finally, we leverage data, insights, and customer needs analyses to inform our decisions and product strategies. We do this responsibly and with robust frameworks. With that, I'll turn it back to Trevor to discuss our online RMG strategy.
Well, thanks, Matt, and before I hand over to Moti, I just thought I'd provide some deeper context to you around our strategic context for the build and buy investment in RMG over the past couple of years. This culminated with the launch of our newest operating business in Aristocrat Interactive, shortly after we closed the NeoGames acquisition in late April. As we talked to customers, employees, and stakeholders, the clear message we received was that the Aristocrat name is a powerful one in regulated gaming. It communicates world-class content, performance, and trust. Rebranding the combined business to Aristocrat Interactive was therefore alright the right choice, and will help us to implement our growth plans and unlock value over time.
We see huge excitement from our teams as we've unveiled the brand, and we're looking forward to a complete switch over to Aristocrat Interactive, both internally and in the market in coming months. Our online RMG strategy recognizes that our customers were looking to provide retail and online solutions, and that we could ultimately see convergence and regulation over time, facilitated by data and technology, high mobile penetration, and shifting player preferences. The acquisition of NeoGames substantially completes the first foundational phase in the strategic journey. This slide shows a number of the key brands and businesses acquired through NeoGames and Roxor acquisitions completed in the last year, and highlights the investment thesis.
Namely, the complementary combination of Aristocrat's market-leading content and long-standing customer and regulatory relationships with NeoGames' industry-leading platform and technology, is a powerful one that positions us to unlock exciting growth opportunities. Today, we have opportunities in existing regulated markets, where we have low or no share, with strong customer relationships, iGaming content, and land-based content, plus innovation in existing iLottery markets for growth. We've previously spoken about the significant revenue opportunities that would flow from combining our complementary businesses and capabilities. We're well advanced in identifying and delivering, and monitoring these. Looking through the online RMG value chain, we see outstanding opportunity to monetize Aristocrat content and brands through iLottery eInstant, which represent close to 90% of iLottery sales. Commercial agreements are already in place for the distribution of Aristocrat's leading game content via Pariplay.
A strong aggregator with over 170 operators, particularly across EMEA. We'll leverage our numerous relationships across our over 300 gaming jurisdictions globally, to win new contracts through the NeoGames aggregation business. We also believe that we can win new player account management, or PAM, and manage service contracts by providing an integrated end-to-end solution of content, platforms, and services to customers. Over time, we'll also see considerable opportunities for growth across complementary adjacencies in other areas. While these are mostly at a relatively early stage of development, we are well advanced in our mobile on-premise solution. This is a customized digital solution for iGaming developed specifically to cater for the unique requirements of our tribal customers in North America. Aristocrat Interactive will report under three operational pillars, which are shown on the slide: iLottery, content, and gaming systems.
Moti will share more detail on these shortly. iLottery is a new business for us, and we're really excited about adding the diversity to our customers, and also the growth across the group through serving lotteries throughout the world with a complementary solution of new content from Aristocrat and NeoGames platform and services. Content will include one of the leading gaming aggregators in Pariplay, as part of NeoGames, with access to over 170 operators, along with great content already being produced by Aristocrat Interactive. Gaming systems will include CX and NeoGames technology, platforms and services for iGaming and online sports betting. These operating divisions share similar features, enabling content and service delivery and profit drivers as well.
All three of these reporting pillars operate in gaming markets that have large, growing, addressable markets, and offer enormous potential for us to compete to take share. We're also moving quickly into scaling phase of our strategy with a focus on squarely accelerating growth and improving strength of our offerings in existing regulated markets. Taking share from competitors, partnering with our land-based customers with technology, content, and product solutions, we refer to this as phase one on this slide. Beyond that, Interactive will look to optimize its portfolio by entering adjacencies and strengthening technology platforms. Leveraging data and systems to build a single cross-channel view of the player will, over time, help our customers build loyalty and allow us to innovate and bring new products and services to the portfolio.
Our ultimate vision is to be the most trusted interactive player globally, and it gives me great pleasure to now introduce you to Moti Malul, the CEO of Aristocrat Interactive, who is fully focused on ensuring we deliver on this vision. Welcome, Moti, and welcome to Aristocrat.
Thanks, Trevor. Where's the clicker? Over here. Thanks. Hey. Hi, everyone, I'm Moti Malul. I see some familiar faces in the crowd, but mostly not, so admittedly, I'm a bit nervous, this being my first time in front of this audience. I joined NeoGames about 16 years ago, and when I joined NeoGames, it was a small, 30 people, B2C company that focused on pioneering online scratch cards, of all things, and I joined it towards the end of 2008 in order to start a transition into being a B2B vendor, then being a B2G vendor, working with with government lotteries, and then going to taking it public. By the way, not for the faint of the hearted, it was done at the peak of COVID in November 2020, full remote.
Met my chairman only a year after go live. And then from that on, going forward with buying the group of companies, which is Aspire Global, that is such an important part of our portfolio, taking us into gaming and sports betting. And now the exciting news of joining Aristocrat, and I have the pleasure to be recently appointed CEO of Aristocrat Interactive. Why am I so excited about this? I'm really, really so excited about this, is that because I think it's a unique opportunity. I think we have a combination of things that makes us unique in the market. One is that we probably have one of the broadest, if not the broadest portfolio of products.
We serve anything from lottery products, sports betting, gaming and content, managed services, aggregation, everything, and of course, now topping all of this with the, with the content which is, which has proven to be best in markets that it operates from Aristocrat. So it's really exciting. But it's not only the product portfolio, it allows us to play on a very wide TAM. Because in any online real money gaming world, you basically have three sub-TAMs that makes the total TAM. One is iLottery, the other, which is admittedly the biggest, is iGaming, and then the third one is sports betting. And we have the opportunity to play on all three, and we feel that we have the opportunity to play a significant role in each of the three, bringing us to a broad opportunity.
But as you will see in the further slides, it's not only that, we are also very geographically spread. We're not concentrated on one region only. Yes, obviously, North America is the largest region with an opportunity for lotteries and also for other segments. However, we are already deployed with our customers and solutions across four continents, and some of them are growing in the opportunity going forward. So I think the combination of diversity and deep breadth of portfolio and products and customers is what makes this opportunity truly unique, and the potential is, in our opinion, enormous into the future. Trevor focused on the reporting pillars. I will spend my presentation explaining more on how we run the business and how we have included the different parts of our business units and product lines into customer segments.
And when we looked at this, we decided to focus on customers, customers and customer types. So first is lotteries, because they procure in a unique way, usually long processes. I will get to it later on. Government procurement processes and working with governments is a bit different than working with others, and that's why we kept it as a segment in itself with the position that we have carved ourselves as a leading position, especially in the North American market, but also playing a role in other markets. So I'll spend some time about that. The other one is the exciting combination between Pariplay, which is a leading content aggregator, and for those of you who do not know what content aggregation is, I will spend some time explaining in the next couple of slides.
Now combining this with the content coming in from the Aristocrat land-based gaming studios and the pure online studios, bringing this opportunity together. The third is gaming system, which is an important enabler to our business. Within this, we grouped all of the gaming systems that we have in the group because they share a lot of commonalities, whether it's land-based gaming systems, online gaming systems, and also sports betting, which is a gaming system in itself. Coupling this, of course, with managed services that play such a key role in our success, and I will spend a bit more time explaining about managed services and how it keeps us current to acting and feeling what our customers and operators do.
I'm very fortunate to have such a great leadership team, in my group, which is a combination of NeoGames veterans, with years of experience in their fields, together with Anaxi and, and Aristocrat, team members that have been excelling in their career and in their parts going forward. We think that this combination is one that marries the cultures between the organization. I have to say that, since the acquisition was announced and through the integration process, and of course, even more so since closing, we have been seeing nothing but wild, positive endorsement by everyone in Aristocrat and such a culture fit between the companies in almost everything that we do.
I encourage all of you, later on, when materials will be available, to go in and read about these leaders, each of them with the years of experience that they have to, to master and lead their domains. Then when it comes to our part of the Aristocrat portfolio, we're the young kids in the family, so obviously, we are still with a long way to go. The revenues on the upper parts and the profits are not inclusive of NeoGames numbers. These are revenues as they have been reported in the first half, revenues of Aristocrat, which, which show Anaxi, that is the combination of the CX and the iGaming business, being 3% of the group revenues and 2% of profit.
When you dived into those revenues, again, excluding NeoGames, 86% of them was made through the land-based CX business and 14% through the iGaming content business, which has only launched its first game online about 12 months ago. So with, with respect, it's still carving its place.
And we've also included a segue of how Pro Forma would have looked like if we were a combined business, and we will share a bit more numbers about that towards the end of the presentation, where you would see that 60% of the business is made out of the combination of all the gaming systems, 22% of the business is currently content and aggregation, and 18% is iLottery. Before I dive into explaining each of the sections separately, I just wanted to make sure that we are all aligned on terminology, because we are not selling EGMs. We are in a business that is online, and therefore, we wanted to align everyone on a new terminology for the investors to learn, which is GGR, NGR, and rev shares. Okay? So put yourself in the position of an operator, a gaming operator.
How do they make their money online? So first starting point is GGR, which is basically sports betting wagers or bets on a slot or ticket sales in a lottery turnover. Then deducted by the price paid to the player, which will give you GGR. And then, because obviously we are working in regulated markets, there's taxes to pay and player incentives, and that would bring you to what we call net gaming revenues. Net gaming revenues is usually what we perceive to be as the 100% of the cake from which operators go ahead and procure services, platforms, content with their vendors, and of course, make their profits off. So then the operators want to start their own business. How would they do that? They need a platform. They need some—a gaming platform to run their business.
A gaming platform is not only the player account system, it's the data solutions, it's the marketing automation systems, the segmentation systems. It's everything that is the platforms that basically runs the show. We saw a range of 3%-6% in the market, although, again, it can skew higher, as we have seen in some cases, depending on the size and the market. We are generalizing here in order to give you ranges and just put you familiar with the cases. The underlying platform. On top of the underlying platform, you need to put content. Content could be slot games, content could be sport betting, and content could be bingo, content could be lottery games or whatever. Usually, operators try to unlock hundreds of titles, and they would do this through aggregation. Guess what?
We have an aggregation service that is world-leading, and we would sell them aggregation services, and then we would charge for our piece of the rev share for anything that runs on top of aggregation, regardless if it's our content, third-party content, or anyone else. And then on top of that content, and again, we have our leading content in many, many markets, which we plan to introduce to the core markets of Aristocrat Online, but then, of course, into the future, into other new markets, and I will talk about that later on. But also sport betting. Sport is content, lottery is content, any game is a content, and then the regions of content is what you see here in the picture.
In some cases, certain operators which have less experience managing their businesses in the online domain would also need services from us because they have less experience in running customer support 24/7, or compliance, or cash out, or marketing, or segmentation, or data insights. So we have a team of experts that have been providing actively those services to operators in Europe for many, many years. When we formed our North American ventures, we have also brought this team to see the operations of managed services. We have also seen that in some cases, operators will cherry-pick and will say, "We just wanna buy a platform from you, or content from you, or whatever." But in some cases, they would bundle and say, "We want everything.
Can you give us a one-off price?" We have seen that model more common in the lottery industry, but not only, we have quite a few gaming deals which also go with that sense. And the fact that we have everything in-house allows us to bundle. Not everyone can. We can come up to the operator and say, "We'll give you a very attractive price because we have everything for you, and if you take even a further piece of our content, then we will give you marketing incentives," and we can work with them to grow the business.
And the one thing that I want you to take from this slide is that because of the position I've mentioned earlier, us having such a broad portfolio, we are able to carve probably the highest potential of pieces that you can have from net gaming, because if you put all the slices together, we can get up to the highest potential that an operator will procure. So now starting with the segments. The first one is iLottery, and recognizing the fact that this is new to the investor base of Aristocrat, I'll spend a bit more time on this segment than the other ones. The global iLottery market, which we will see numbers of in the next couple of slides, is a big one, and we have started to play a role in that market about 15 years ago.
Remember, I told you we were a B2C of scratch cards, and then we thought at some point, ha, lotteries may need scratch cards, let's go and do that. And so in 2009, we started to work with lotteries in Europe. The first customer that we had was Sisal in Italy. By the way, still a very good friend, very good customers until today, 15 years later, as all of our other customers. And we slowly started to roll our content across more lotteries in Europe. And then we've identified that there's an opportunity opening in the U.S. We formed a joint venture to go after that market. I will tell you a bit more about it when we get to the zoom-in slide of the U.S. market. Today, we serve 27 lotteries globally.
In the North American market, we have carved ourselves a position where the customers using our solutions are running 71% of iLottery wagers across the entire U.S. market, which is phenomenal. And then that puts us in a leading position in that market, which is in its nascent phases, and it will continue to grow into the future years. The market itself. So when we looked at lotteries 15 years ago at NeoGames, what have we seen as the opportunity? We've seen it as an opportunity, you know, to data. Lotteries measure their global turnover by sales, not by GGR. It may change later on, but that's how the industry measures itself. And the global market of lotteries is today north of $340 billion in sales.
That translates itself to about $140 billion in GGR. As you have seen in the previous slide, 14 of those are our iLottery already today, with growth opportunity that you can see in front of you. When we looked at the world, we have seen that the per capita sales, i.e., the per player yield, is highest in Europe and in North America, and that's why we've put our initial efforts into the European market. But because North America was not yet open, and when North America opened, we immediately transitioned into it to be a first mover, and grabbed the share that we have been able to grab, and I will explain a bit more about this in the next couple of slides.
We do see, though, that beyond Europe and North America, other regions in the world carry opportunities. We see Latin America starting to open into iLottery slowly. We were the first to launch in Brazil, and I will add that to the story as well. And even closer to here, we do think that what we call non-China Asia-Pacific as a region has an opportunity in the next few years to slowly open up when more and more countries which have not yet endorsed their lotteries into the online channel will start doing so. So when we will see markets opening up, we will take our leadership position and try to carve our our share in those markets as well. Lotteries, a unique customer base, which has its own characteristics, which I wanted to spend two minutes about.
By most government entities or semi-government entities, and even if they are not government entities, by most, they would be private entities, which are monopolies, so they have their own way of acting. They would look at things very long term. The sales cycles are long, the contracts are usually very long term, this being government contract and so on, which makes this market very much based on relationship and trust, and because they don't switch vendors every day. The other thing which is important to know about this market is that it requires unique tech. Now, that may come as a surprise, but it shouldn't, because like any other operator, they require unique tech. Sports betting is a unique tech, and lotteries is a unique tech. Draw games is unique tech, which I will spend time explaining.
The systems that issue the Powerball and Mega Millions tickets and so on is unique tech. Even instant tickets, scratch cards, is unique tech. And not so many vendors in the world have decided to focus their, their, destiny into developing this unique tech, which is very expensive to begin with and going after that, that market. In fact, when we have looked at the market back in 15 years ago, we noticed that the vast majority of the global market, the vast, vast majority of the global market, is controlled by three vendors in retail and land-based. Three vendors. Control Remember the numbers? $340 billion globally, three vendors. Huge opportunity. And we realized, I came from telecom. I didn't mention that in my first slide.
I spent 10 years or 12 years in telecom, and I noticed in telecom, I actually experienced it firsthand, the switch that telecom had between being, you know, legacy telecom into IP-based, and then opening the door for companies that came with value-added services to sell. You remember WAP browsing, you remember multimedia messaging and all of those things? That's what I used to do in the early 2000s. So usually, when you have a market that is so constrained in tech, there are moments in time where you can penetrate those markets.
That moment in time is that when that market is switching tech, and we notice that there's an inflection point where the market is moving from being retail legacy into online, and we said, "Okay, this is our time." If we come in as a pure play vendor that would just focus on online lotteries, and we will do it better than the legacy vendors that have supported them at retail, we have a chance to be successful. It's not guaranteed, but we have a chance. And we worked very, very hard to carve ourselves into that leading position. Lotteries, again, once you work with them, because of what I've mentioned earlier, being risk-averse in their decision-making and so on, they tend to be very loyal to vendors who are doing well with them. So what do we sell to loyal to lotteries, basically?
We sell three areas of solutions. The first is what we call platforms, okay? So we have all the platforms that lottery needs in order to run their business. So we took our gaming platforms, back in the days in Europe, and along the years, we Swiss Army knifed it to be the most feature-rich with its functionality for lotteries. And we do believe that it's the most feature-rich because it is evident by the success that our customers enjoy in the online domain, as I will show you in numbers in the next couple of slides. Platforms is not only just the player account system and the marketing solution and everything, it's also other systems that they need in order to run their business. The second thing, which is a particular attention to you guys, is what we call NeoDraw.
This is our tech for lottery draw games. It is very rare to have this tech in the market. Not so many companies have that. In fact, if you look into the U.S. market, only four companies are certified by MUSL. MUSL is the body in the U.S. that governs the draws of Powerball tickets and Mega Millions tickets and all of that. So in order to be a provider to lotteries in the U.S., you need to have a certification by MUSL. Only four vendors have that. We are one of them. The three others are the legacy retail vendors, and no other vendor in the world currently has that entry into the U.S. market with a proven success.
I'm particularly proud of our draw game system because people pay their attention to whatever is there, because, you know, almost 90% is made by instant games, and I will get to instant games, but I do want to put a spotlight on draw games. Draw games are a unique U.S.P for lotteries. It's the product that they have that no one else has, and it's a product that brings acquisition. This is the product that bring players, you know, the $1.6 billion jackpots. There has been actually one of $2.1 billion last year with, with Powerball and so on. This is the acquisition tool of player. This is why everyone wants after these games. And also, it's high profitable because it's, it's products which have-
Payouts, which are usually lower than the payouts of instant games and high, fast revolving. Now, I'm particularly proud of this thing, because when you measure the sales of draw games of our customers in the online channels, as a percentage of how they sell draw games completely, we are seeing way more success rates than the vendors who are supporting other customers in the market, and I will show you what I mean when it comes to states. What does that mean? It means that, for, on average, when we sell or when our customers sell draw games online through our solutions, they see north of 20%, in some cases, even 40% of the total sale of that product from an online channel, and we see that success going forward.
This is because of the unique functionality that we have included a long time. And then, very important, the NeoCube and NeoEngage, which I see as going together. We developed a very comprehensive data solution for our customers to gain daily insights, to segment their players in order to know how to engage with players and what kind of engagement features and functionality to offer them. And we coupled that with what we call NeoEngage, which is basically our marketing automation system that allows building player journeys in order to know at what point in time, and based on what the player is doing, what type of engagement would work best with them into the market. So all of this is what we call platforms. And then NeoGames Studio.
Again, we started to do games earlier than anyone else, and we've launched games in the market as far as the instant games and scratch cards as early as 2006. I wasn't in NeoGames back, back, back then, and we have not steered away from that. So our studio was kept focused on instant games. Every couple of years, they come to us and say, "Please allow us maybe to do other games." And we said, "No, you're world leaders. This is what you guys are doing. If you want to do something else, we will have other studios." And they excel in this. In the majority, the vast majority of our customer base, when we provide our games too, we have the largest share of wallet.
Producing great games, and I encourage you guys to see some videos of the games in our websites and in our materials. For example, last year in 2023, this studio won, with a game called Desert Fantasy, the best game launched in the U.S. market when competing with all the slot game online real money gaming vendors. So we have beaten all the slot providers in the U.S. and won prize of best game with Desert Fantasy, which is a game that is working phenomenally well across our customer base, and this is just one example. The last area, last but not least, again, lotteries, in many cases, especially in North America, are lean organizations that run huge operations. So a lottery could, you know, take the Michigan Lottery.
More than $4 billion in sales, and it's an organization of less than 200 people. So they procure also services because they want us to help them run their business. So then we have managed services, where we can provide them anything from 24/7 customer support, we provide them with compliance, with cash outs, with marketing, services, even acquisition, if they want us to help them with acquisition of digitally, digitally online. Of course, also with tech operations, you know, we were the first in the U.S. to get full certification to deploy a fully cloud solution for a lottery, which was Virginia last year, and now we see that everyone are replicating that and continuing to move into the cloud. We are moving New Hampshire into the cloud next year. We will move other customers.
We are deploying West Virginia in the cloud, and I will explain a little bit more about that. So that is when it comes to the managed services. By the way, how did we know how to do managed services? Because we were B2C, and because we have our European white label business that I will get to. So we keep current, and we have teams which are managing services, and when we seeded the U.S. operation, we relocated a few team members back in 2014 into the U.S. to basically set up the operation over there. I talked about instant games. Trevor mentioned it's almost 90% of GGR of a lottery that sells both iLottery and draw games, and 85%-90% really depends on the lottery. So what is instant games online?
And you will go, you can, you look at videos and so on, but what is it, basically? You have to remember that, like any kind of a game type from land-based, the regulation of instant games is different, exactly like there's differences between Class II and Class III and VLTs or whatever. Instant tickets is, is a game where you have a predefined pool of results that is pre-printed, and you pick a result from a file. Once you picked the card, the result is known. Now it's only a matter of your own entertainment of revealing it, but you're not controlling the result anymore, okay?
So what we have taken, we've taken these games, which at early phases were admittedly a bit boring, because when we saw others doing it, they just took a game, they replicated it to the online, and actually allowed people to scratch the screen, which is great. It's great to scratch a desktop screen. Back then, it was desktops. It's great to scratch a desktop screen with your mouse twice, but not 20 times, so we changed that a bit. What we tried to do across our times is basically to put life into the way that you play instant games. I wanted to share with you a short video of just showing you three examples of games with major themes. One theme would be number match game, another theme would be symbol match games, and so on.
So we took themes that we knew players like from land-based, from retail lotteries. By the way, along the years, we started also to bring themes from social and marry them into Which is why I think we have such a great opportunity, also, taking what Product Madness has done, is bringing it later on into the lottery industry. So we wanted to share with you a few games and the innovations that we have done with them along the years. So this is a very core theme, especially in the U.S. market, but not only, which is called number match. So we have taken a game that was just a flat game, and we added bonus rounds and other reveals, and when you collect three rubies or three diamonds, you can get yourself into bonus rounds again. All of this is just entertainment.
The result is known since you clicked buy, but it's just a matter of creating entertainment for the players. Then we introduced something which is called multi-tickets, because we realized that players may wanna buy more than one ticket at once and then have a holistic experience across multi-tickets, so you can buy seven ticket at once. And as you can see with the graphics, as you can see with the way that you play games, these are games which are created for less, for softer players, let's call it. Players which are more risk-averse.
So also, I wouldn't bore you with math of games, but, but lottery players are more risk-averse, so it means that if they would usually lose 3 or 4 times, it's not, it's not—Sometimes slots players may lose 10 times, and then they would, they would win in the, in the 11th or more. Lotteries have a different payout and a different way of math created for, for their Thank you. We can go back. So there's a whole art of how to create math that fits the risk-averse nature of lottery players, that at some point, I can share with you guys. Now, moving into the U.S. market, which has become our greatest success. So a little about the history and how to read that map, because you can't see here, but there is history written all over this.
So the U.S. market, up until 2012, was not allowed to do any gaming or sport, as you know, or iLottery, to that matter of fact. It only started in 2012, with the first DOJ opinion. The first two states that did iLottery, Georgia and Illinois, didn't do public procurement processes. They did that with their land-based vendor because it was easy for them, as always. Then we came into the market, and we said, "Okay, in order to go into the U.S. market," which is again, risk-averse, credibility and everything I spoke, "we better do it through a partnership." We found a great partner in the form of Pollard Banknote, which was back then, a company that is doing printed scratch cards, basically.
Second largest vendor in the world for printed scratch cards, and we created a partnership with them to go after that market together, where we would bring our platforms, our knowledge, our games, our operations, and they brought, you know, market access and market credibility, and we jointly went after the market. What we've done is that we convinced Michigan to be the first state in the U.S. ever, to actually issue a public procurement process to buy an iLottery solution from a vendor that knows how to do iLottery. And we went in and won that one. And not only that we won it, we made it almost overnight, such an amazing success compared with what existed in the market. That almost overnight, the new paradigm shift in the market was that other lotteries started to issue public procurement process for iLottery.
With our growing success in Michigan, which became the poster boy of how lotteries should work online, we were able to win the other one. We won Virginia in 2015. They were just a subscription program that in 2020 evolved into a full iLottery program. We then won North Carolina. By the way, North Carolina, the first-ever lottery that transitioned from a previous iLottery vendor into ours. And I'm very proud of that success because they just sold draw games online. In the last year with the previous vendor, 2019, they sold about $20 million in ticket sales of draw games online.
In the last year, last fiscal year of 2023, before they added instant games, so they were just, again, with the draw games portfolio, they sold $150 million online with our solutions and with a lot of hard dedication and work. And now, of course, they launched instant games, and are doing phenomenally well, and I will share that later. We then added New Hampshire, and then West Virginia, which was the last win that we have done as part of the partnership that we have within NPI, and West Virginia is planned to go live later this year. But then, as you may know, early last year, early 2023, we have announced that the partnership that we had with Pollard, which is great, is continuing to maintain our existing account.
However, when opportunities will be introduced into the market, we may explore them ourselves. The first such one was New Hampshire, which is a NeoPollard customer, that ended its period of contract and went into a public procurement process, which we went after by ourselves, and we won. And as you have seen, maybe the press release that was sent overnight, we signed a contract with them to be their future vendor, starting from middle of 2025. Now, interestingly enough, as I said, it's 7 + 3 + 3, so 7 years, going maybe until 13 years, again, long-term. And we are going to provide them everything, including mobile apps, loyalty solutions that we referenced earlier, our games, of course, our technology, marketing services. We are going to help them do omni-channel marketing with their land base and so many other activities.
What I want you also to take from this map is look how empty it is. There's only 10 states that are doing full iLottery programs, a few more states which are selling draw games, but there are 47 states with retail lotteries in the U.S., and there's so much to go. We believe that the position that we have brought ourselves to be number one in the market should allow us to gain significant market share as the market opens up. The combination of, relatively speaking, low competition that we have seen in the market and our leadership position should hopefully allow for that going forward. A bit about our success in how you measure it. Look at the upper left slide. Proud of that. Per capita sales, our four customers occupy the first four places.
North Carolina only launched in November. They are already number 4, and they will probably go up the chain. Also, when you measure this by the penetration of iLottery from the total sales. Look at Virginia, first U.S. lottery that already does more than 50% of their turnover from the online channel. And New Hampshire, pretty sure that we will get them there, when we continue to work with them in the next couple of years. Michigan, in 30%, it's a bit of an outlier because 30% of their retail portfolio of draw games is not sold online, so when you compare it, it skews the number a little bit downward, but they're very, very successful. And I remind all of you, Michigan is a very, very vibrant iGaming state, still a very successful lottery. And then I can go on and on.
When you look at the U.S. market as a pie chart, 71% of the total iLottery wagers are generated through customers that use our, our solutions. We noticed that outside of the U.S., U.S. Lotteries is very distinct, doing their own games, and sport betting and online iGaming is done by the private market. However, outside of the U.S., even if you look up north to Canada, or if you look into Europe, you basically see that lotteries started with their initial portfolio, and then they added gaming, and they became full-power gaming houses. Two years ago, we said, "Okay, if we don't go to gaming a long time, we will have nothing to bring to our customers, and we will lose the strategic position that we have as a partner." We went and bought the Aspire group of companies.
That gave us, in one shot, a sports betting solution from BtoBet, a leading aggregation platform from Pariplay, and of course, gaming operation know-how through the Aspire core business. We have immediately embedded it in our business. So we brought, you know, Pariplay to Sazka to do aggregation. Pariplay is in PlayAlberta, doing the aggregation over there. We brought BtoBet sports betting into PlayAlberta, and we replaced the previous vendor that we have there. Even in Brazil, where last year we launched the first-ever regulated lottery brand in a Brazilian state, the second-largest state in Brazil, the state of Minas Gerais. So we put our energy into being a partner to our customers longer term.
What's nice about it, and of course, you can see the opportunity, 55% of European lotteries are doing sports betting, 20% of them, and growing, are doing iGaming, and so we have so much to give them. Interestingly enough, we are already immediately, and I remind you, we only closed this, this deal with Aristocrat six weeks ago, very proud that this week, PlayAlberta are going to launch Aristocrat games. They are going to be the first province monopoly site in Canada to launch Aristocrat games because of this relationship, and they're so excited with this.
Issued, issued PR about it and are talking a lot about it in the market, and it just shows you the opportunity that we have also with lotteries, bringing the actual gaming content of Aristocrat, and also an opportunity that we see bringing the Aristocrat brands into the lottery market and creating instant games with the known brands from from Aristocrat in in the market, which is a great opportunity that we have already started to work on, and probably next year, we will launch the first game, which we'll see a brand of an Aristocrat launch into the into the lottery market. So just to summarize on on all of this, again, we built ourself into a position that we are true partners with our customer.
One point of reference that I'm so proud of, really so proud of, and knock on wood, I hope not to jinx this, but in 15 years that we work with lotteries globally, we have never lost an account, okay? We were always able to re-win, renew, extend, whatever you call this, because when you work with this industry and you drive results, they also have an interest to continue to work with you. I will hope that it will continue to be the case into the future. We're putting a lot of hard work into it. Again, our leading position in the U.S. market should suggest that when more states open up, we should be able to carve a good share of that, of that market.
Four years in a row, Lottery Supplier of the Year, which again is something that makes us very proud. The second interesting business unit is the most exciting combination between our leading aggregation platform and Aristocrat content, which is the magic in this combination, okay? We have layered the network of pipelines across the globe with Pariplay, where we are serving more than 170 operators across the globe. And in each of those four regions, we are serving the leading operators in those regions, not smaller ones. And up until now, we have been primarily offering the services of aggregation to these operators by basically bringing third party to them, because in NeoGames, I admit, first-party content wasn't the lion's share of what we did.
We do have a talented studio in the form of Wizard Games that was a part of Pariplay, but it wasn't Aristocrat size. And now we have the opportunity to bring the Aristocrat content and the 13 studios that Matt mentioned earlier and their success, which Aristocrat has proven time and again, that when it puts its energy to be successful with content in a segment, whether it's land-based and now we saw into social and so on, they are able to be successful. And we have all reasons to believe that we should be able to replicate similar success into the online channel by harnessing the studio talent into bringing games into the online. So this is basically putting water into the pipelines. 4 continents, 170 operators with all of this content going forward.
The expected CAGR growth of this market is phenomenal because more and more markets will open up. As you see, only in the U.S., this market is expected to grow in more than 25% CAGR, 26, according to some, and even more according to others. Even globally, we see more and more markets opening up. Brazil is in the news lately. It's a big market which is going through legislation cycles that would allow iGaming to be seen in that country as well. There are other regions which we are definitely after that we have not yet brought Aristocrat content into. This is when I say Aristocrat content, what I mean, it's a combination of studios, some of them focused on pure online.
Roxor has fantastic content for the U.S. market, which is purely online, that resonates very, very well. Actually, when we launched Roxor games into the U.S. markets, they've also been showing early success. And Wizard Games, that was a Pariplay studio, then combining that with the Aristocrat family of studios and others going into the future. So we have great content, great talent, that I have no doubt will be able to be successful in the online channels. And we wanted to share with you a few games, videos, again, representing both pure online games, like Double Bubble, created by Roxor, and of course, our major brands and titles from Aristocrat and others. Back. Thank you. One of the early signs that makes us feel comfortable about our potential future position is the yield per game.
We've only recently launched, as I said, only 12 months ago, first title released to the market, so for the moment, we have a bit over 30 titles in the market. But when you look on a per-title performance, we can definitely see that our games resonate, and it gives us good confidence to consider that into the future, when we will continue to release titles that have resonated with players in that region. In North America, we should be able to carve a good share of that market and continue moving up the rank of vendors in that market. And again, not only in the U.S., also in Canada, that we have recently launched at. How do we do all of that? One slide about technology, because we tend to forget about technology. Pariplay is a matchmaker.
That's what they do. They're a matchmaker made in heaven, actually. Their KPI is what we call connections, connections between vendors and games and operators. This is what they do. And when their account management and customer success team works with customers, they are measured by connections. And they've done that by introducing a technology that is rapidly deployed. For example, in the last 2 years, on average, every quarter, we were able to launch 5 new accounts. And it's definitely a pace that we have proven to ourselves and to the market that we can support, and there's a lot of demand to it. You don't get to 170 operators if you don't have a technology that can allow you to scale.
We also have what we call Ignite, which is some studios are small. They don't have their own RGS. They just have a talent of designers and mathematicians and so on. So we allow them to deploy games on our GDK, that runs on our RGS into those markets. And we have a few smaller studios that have shown initial signs of success with that, with that model.
To sum up this exciting combination between truly the network of pipeline that we have underlaid globally across four continents with leading operators in each of them, together with the Aristocrat content, and as legislation will increase, also, when more and more markets will open up, either in U.S. or elsewhere, we will be there with our content and with our solutions as one of the first into the market. The combination of our talented studio with all of this creates an opportunity of scale. We are not going to move away, by the way, from our aggregation business, okay? At the same time, while we are doing first-party content, we will continue to focus on providing aggregation services with third-party content and 15,000 game titles to our customers, because that's what they want from us.
We are going to give them the options, and because our games are, in our opinion, going to be able to better perform, they will select our games. But we will give them options, because we believe in giving our customers options, always. And then, last but not least, is gaming systems. Gaming systems is the area of our business where we have included the three segments that I will go into in further details. When you look at that segment, it has success all around. When you look at the CX business, it has more than 260,000 EGMs connected. When you look at the jurisdictions that we are live with certification, it's over 200 of them.
When you look at the GGR that we have generated from iGaming operators, it's more than $500 million and growing. Recurring revenue, so there's success all over the place when you look at the different parts that makes this, this exciting gaming system segment. And as I've mentioned, it's three parts of this. So first is land-based casino. Now, you may ask the question, and maybe you want to ask, "Why is land-based gaming systems in interactive?" It's because of two main things. Number one, it's a gaming system enabler that we feel has a lot of similarities with what we see from PAMs in the online domain, and there is a lot of lessons learned between the two of how to, create best practices when it comes to deployment of tech, and others.
But more importantly, the gaming land-based systems are in a transition from being a regulatory enabler, product-focused on managing flow of products, into being player-focused with loyalty programs, with personal cards, with e-wallets, and so on. And as they are making this transitioning from product-focused into player-focused, we see a vision of convergence between the player-focused systems of the online that could bring a lot of features and functionality at some point with this. So into the future, we definitely have a vision that we think more and more synergies will evolve in front of us as we continue to do that, and especially when we will supply our solutions into land-based CX customers that will allow us to introduce omni-channel solutions.
Which is something that every customer of land-based we have spoken with, within the market, says, "We are interested in omni-channel solutions." So that's why they, they're a good marriage and a fantastic team to have with us. And then the second is iGaming and sports, which is our pure solutions for iGaming and sports betting operators, that I will go into. And the third, last but not least, is what we call white label. This is when we work with operators that only want to focus on being best in driving traffic and user acquisition, and we will do all the rest for them. And that keeps us very current because we are running the full managed services for them. So one slide on each.
First is the CX business, truly a very successful business that we are so proud and happy to have in the Interactive family. In Australia, as you are probably aware, number one in New South Wales, playing such a key role, working closely with the government on innovations along the years. More than 30% of the total EGMs in the market in New South Wales are served through our CX solution. In the U.S. market, working across so many jurisdictions with more than 230,000 EGMs connected, and having a significant share of the market, both on the tribal as well as on the commercial sides, and a lot of opportunity that comes out of that.
And we're very proud of the success that they have been able to achieve in recent years. On the pure iGaming and sports betting part, again, already a success. We are deployed with solutions live in four continents, in Africa, in Europe, in Latin America, and recently also in North America, even before the combination with Aristocrat. First live customer online sports betting with Action 24/7, working on PlayLive! PlayLive! is interesting, an important gaming customer for land-based, a CX customer for the land-based gaming management system, and now an online customer. So we see a lot of synergies in such accounts in trying to bring them the best solutions that we have in the market. But it's even broader than that.
Logrand in Mexico, and other opportunities in Latin America, Premier Bet, which works in more than 15 markets in Africa, and being a market leader over there, PlayAlberta, where we have introduced our sports betting solutions, and others. So we see great opportunities with this, as we go along, and we are currently certified and licensed in more than 38 jurisdictions as an online vendor. What do we sell to online operators? Again, a full solution, with our PAM that I've mentioned earlier. By the way, just that you will know, it's the same PAM of lotteries. We have converged it because, as I told you, lotteries have also gone into gaming. So we have the same set of software that allows basically to run across, with features and functionalities supporting all markets, with bonuses, with player accounts, with KYCs and all.
It's the same system. Then we've added here also the marketing automation and the data. Data, again, we have one data universe that runs across all our customer bases, so we are able to look at behaviors of players across multiple domains. Not on a specific player basis, because put aside the actual players, but on an aggregated data, you get a lot of insights from looking across everything. And last, but very much not least, something we started to invest two years ago, and we see accelerated front end. One of the best places for operators to differentiate is through front-end solutions. We now have a team, a growing team of mobile app developers, portal developers, that develop effective storefronts for our customers.
Online sports betting, again, 33, I think, if I'm not wrong, states in the U.S. already have regulated sports in them. Only seven have iGaming, but we can work with those 30+ states because we have sports betting. And we don't have to wait until iGaming comes to town, as we would have done with Aristocrat, with If we were only content. Now, we can do sports betting solutions with those customers in those states, waiting for the future. And of course, managed services. Again, the secret sauce, truly. This is the part of the business that keeps our knife sharp, because we are acting as an operator ourselves.
When we go and sell a solution to a customer, we have a lot more credibility because we tell them, "Guys, we are using the same solution we are selling you, and we know what you're going through, and we are working in regulated markets. So when a regulator comes and says that you need to change this, we do this exactly as you do, and we feel your pain, and we know what you're going through." So we are working with them eye to eye and not from here. That builds a lot of credibility, it keeps us current, and also it keeps our solution always current, because the feedback we have from our customer support team makes our systems better. The feedback we have from our marketing teams makes our system better.
This is why this area of the business is one of our secret sauce for, for success. Then to summarize on this one, again, we have a truly comprehensive solution, all the way from platforms and technology, games, online sports betting. We are deployed across four continents with proven customers that have started to show success in those markets, and we have the ability to leverage on the relationship and the customer base, specifically in North America, but not only, of Aristocrat and bring those solutions into the market. So we truly see exciting opportunities going forward. Then the last slide I want to leave you with is that because of everything I shared with you today, we believe we can get to $ 1 billion in revenues from Interactive in fiscal year 2029.
We have included also, I'm not gonna read through this, but we have included also some pro forma numbers of the last three halves as we would have looked like as a joint business, so that you can see the growth trajectory in the business and where we think this could go to. The combination of these, I wanna leave you with three things today. Three things. One, is that we have probably one of the most diverse portfolio of product, diverse geographies, and diverse customer bases, allowing us to play a key role across all three parts of the town. Online sport betting, iLottery, and iGaming. That's one. Number two, we are able to take Aristocrat rapidly and immediately into our network of pipelines that have been underlaid globally with Pariplay and get there fast.
Exactly as we said, we're launching this week on Alberta, we will launch others as well. And number three, Aristocrat can take us into where they are, which is their customers, primary- primarily North America, but not only. So the combinations of these three things, of the diversity across products, customers, geographies, the fact that we can take Aristocrat to our markets, the fact that they can take us to their markets, is one that makes us believe we can get to these billion-dollar numbers. And I'm so excited with this, because, I believe that we have the talent and the team, and the combination and the assistance and support from all the Aristocrat family to be as, successful. And with that, I've concluded my sessions, and be happy to take questions when we get into the Q&A session. Thanks. I did it in time.
I think everyone understands why we were a bit concerned that you'll run over, Moti, but well done.
Yeah. I have 15 seconds.
Great. Well, thanks. So while those speakers come up to the stage for Q&A, I'll just take you through. You know the procedure, we'll have two mics roaming the room, so just grab a mic, ask the question, and just ask the floor directly. There'll be questions taken on the webcast as well. So on the webcast, just lodge your question, we'll pick them up and then we'll ask them directly. Just state your name and organization. Thank you.
Hi, it's Matt Ryan from Barrenjoey. Moti, thanks for the presentation. Just curious with your five-year revenue target, can you talk about what states you're assuming open up within iLotteries and also iGaming?
We haven't taken into account specific states, because we believe we are diverse enough in our geographies to react to any market opening scenario. So, you know, again, I just gave the example of Brazil. It's a market that could have not been in our plans two years ago. Now it's there, we're going after that market, and we have the opportunity to be first to market. So we will be ready when markets open up also in the U.S., but we have not taken into account to count on one market opening more specifically than others, because of the geographic spreads. And we feel that we should be able to get to this number with any scenario of market opening of states that will happen.
You are assuming some market openings within that billion-dollar forecast?
Yeah, we are assuming some market opening, but again, if it's state A or state B, or country A in Europe or country B in Latin America, there's enough for us to play with in order to get to that number. Obviously, we will be happy if there will be a rainfall of states opening up, and then we can get into a higher number. But yes, I think we are ready for any scenario.
Okay, thank you. The range for the fee that you take on lottery seems to be quite wide. Can you talk about what drives that fee, either as a percentage of GGR or NGR?
It really depends on the scope. So the higher end will be when we provide a complete technology solution that is not only the core platform, but also a loyalty program, a mobile app, a portal, but also managed services. The lower range would probably be, sorry, when we provide only our technology solutions without managed services, and where we bring a certain part of our content, but there's a whole range of other content offering from others. So that's why the range looks like that, if that makes sense.
Question here.
Hi, it's David Fabris from Macquarie. Look, you've provided the $1 billion target by FY 2029 revs, and you had that slide that showed the revenue flow through quite nicely. Are you able to talk about profitability, maybe EBIT margins in our lottery and iGaming? I know it's gonna take time to scale, but once you, you get to that $1 billion number, can, can you give any insights on what sort of margin you might be generating?
We're looking at margins on a group level. And, I think, you know, we definitely are at the point that we want the entire group to stay on the D&D levels that we have mentioned, and Interactive is not going to steer the group away from those margin levels. Across our different segments, we will see different margins. So obviously, the content and aggregation one, as content flows up, we'll see the higher ends of the margins. Historically, not revealing anything, we are a publicly traded company, the lottery segment of our business has seen margins which were on an adjusted EBITDA numbers from NeoGames. It was high 30s, in some cases, even low 40s. But again, it will need to be adjusted to the way that Aristocrat measures things.
I don't have a specific margin to give you across interactive, because it will be a blend.
I think, David, just the context. Once scaled, interactive is scaled within the group, the margins from interactive will be higher than digital and lower than gaming. And that's assuming that we take our longer term, mid- to long-term range of 11%-12% for D&D.
Yeah, got it. Understood. That's helpful. And then Matt and Trevor made comments about entering adjacencies through their presentations. Are you able to talk about, you know, what adjacencies you might be looking at? I think live dealer might be one of them, possibly. And maybe also help us understand whether it'll be organic or whether we should be expecting more M&A?
Yeah, so we talk about adjacencies. There's, there's content adjacencies, there's product adjacencies, there's geo-geographical adjacencies. And, and when you look at the, the diversity of Aristocrat now, there are opportunities in each one of the verticals to, to do various things. So whether it's adjacencies in the gaming business, further expansion in the, in the digital business, and then to Moti's point. I think also reverting back to your question earlier, Matt, what we're saying is that realistically, at the moment, we don't have full penetration in the markets we're already in. If you just look at North America iGaming, just as one example, there's seven regulated states; we participate in three. And we have circa 4% share of that three.
So there's that already, organic opportunity for us to get bigger penetration, and that's why we feel that number is achievable with what we can see in front of us. As markets open up, as markets maybe takes longer to open up, as Moti said, it could take us a bit longer. So I'm jumping all over the place. So that's the context of where we see, you know, if you like, the organic business, and we continue to fund that growth through our D&D investment. We continue to fund that through looking at synergies and effectiveness across the organization as a whole. What we do with M&A is around where we would look to accelerate growth.
So that would be through, you know, tuck-ins or certain categories in which we believe we needed to fill out the portfolio to either enter a segment, to scale in the segment, or to become a bigger player in markets we're already in. So we're looking at that strategically. We're taking the same disciplined approach that we take to M&A anyway. We're talking to you today about the confidence around the organic ability to grow the Aristocrat business now, and then we'll use M&A to accelerate the growth over time.
Just one follow-up in there. Just around the comment on tuck-ins, should we be thinking about smaller M&A, or is there sizable transactions like NeoGames size out there still for your business to take on?
We just finished. We're six weeks into the last one, Dave, and I appreciate the opportunity to keep pushing. We're six weeks in, you know, we're doing a lot of work at the moment. We are strategic, as you know, very disciplined around our M&A. We look at what is required in our portfolio, what we require to be successful, what will accelerate our growth, and how we can add, like we used the Product Madness example, how we can add content, technology, customer relationships, market access as a way of accelerating the growth of an asset. So we continue to look at what's in the market. We've got a very disciplined approach to that, and we'll remain disciplined through it.
Hi, it's Adrian Lemme from Citi. Question for you, Moti. Firstly, is there anything about the iGaming industry that would make you think you couldn't get the content share to be somewhere approaching where Aristocrat is in the land-based gaming, please?
Anything that would make me feel that we cannot get the content share?
Yeah. Do you think, basically, do you think your content share can approach where it is in land, or is there something unique about the industry?
We're looking at a few aspects of the market. First of all, in markets where Aristocrat Gaming is present and successful, we have good reasons to believe that we can get to a good share of the market. Second of all, we are intending to put the focus of the talented studios that we have to go after new markets that gaming has not yet been at, that will be pure online RMG markets. And we're looking at those markets through the size of the opportunity of the market, and the competitive landscape of how much we could carve. So I don't know that we can say that we will reach the same level of market share that gaming has in the U.S. in every market that we're going after.
However, we have good reasons to believe that the talent that we have can get us into being a significant sharer in markets that we decide to make them focus markets. And we will have markets that are focus markets and markets which will just be secondary. We've seen that also, for example, with our own content. So we have markets that we call North America first, that we also bring to Europe, so we'll have it will have modest success. But when we will decide to focus on a country in Europe, for example, that we want to be successful at, I think we have good reasons to believe that we have the right talent to be successful there.
Thank you. I appreciate you haven't, you know, stated a specific allowance for new states in your billion-dollar target, but can you talk to the current regulatory momentum in the U.S.? Are there any states you'd call out where you think in the next two to three years, it's likely that iGaming will be legalized, please?
There are definitely a number of states that we see discussions happening at. I would be careful from naming them. Others are naming them, you know, often. There has been, you know, tied up. I would generally say that we do see that there's discussion traction into next year that could lead into market opening in the next three years with more states. But as Trevor said, I think what we are focused on now is getting to the share that we can in the market that we can operate. I'm reminding you that North America is not only the U.S. The Canadian market is an important market for us and for Aristocrat, and we have only started.
Again, we are only launching this week, the first game in, in Alberta with, with Aristocrat, and that's, that's a very, very important market for gaming, where they are very successful. We have reasons to believe. So if you look at North America, it's U.S. and Canada. So if you add the provinces in Canada that can offer iGaming to the 7 states that are open, and out of them, we are only at 3, and out of the 3, we are at 4% market share, believe me, the team is busy enough, before more states are opened, and we will be ready when they are.
Thanks very much.
Yeah, question here.
Hi, guys. Justin Barratt from CLSA. Moti, just wanted to ask, iLottery specifically, we've seen the rise of lottery couriers, more recently. I just wanted to get your comments on how you think about lottery couriers and the potential for them to impact the progressive legalization of iLottery across the U.S. at this point in time.
Lottery couriers have been so far a bridge for some of the states that do not have iLottery to try and allow iLottery sales. Again, only draw games, I'm reminding you that 85%-90% of GGR is instant games. They're selling draw games, they're primarily selling the jackpot games. In my personal opinion, it plays a good driver for states to see the opportunity of what could happen if they actually open an iLottery market. And it's a catalyst for us to speak with legislator and say, "Hey, you may not think you have iLottery, but you already do. And here's the opportunity that this gives you, but here's the opportunity that this can give you," and driving more money into states.
It is a point—driving money into states is an important factor because what we have shown legislators along the years is that iLottery, because it's a government agency, and because of the You remember the slide with the NGR and the carve-off share? So we sell solutions, total solutions in, you know, 20% each, 15%-20%, whatever, to lotteries. Think about what the state pockets. We have given enough legislator a back of an envelope calculation that shows them, and again, it's no competition, it's not on expense of. However, iLottery could put into the state's pocket more than four times on a dollar spent than sport betting. Why? Because take $100 million in net gaming on sports and $100 million in net gaming in iLottery.
$100 million on net gaming in iLottery, again, average of the deals in the market, not only ours, other vendors as well, is the range of, let's say, mid-teens. The rest is a small marketing budget that the states will have and so on, and they will pocket 75%+ of the net gaming. Sports betting, fantastic market opening. We can play, and we are playing a good role there over there. However, when you look at the tax rates paid to the states, you can see that it's almost the other end of the picture. So we are And courier as well.
So when you look at the, at the opportunity to the, to the state to basically make money, it's, or bring more, more revenues into state budgets, and in many cases, into dedicated vehicles, such as education funds and so on, iLottery is a significant opportunity for that. Michigan, since launch, through iLottery alone, has contributed more than $1 billion into state education fund.
Fantastic. Thank you for that. And then maybe a question for you, Matt. Just noting that the Dragon Link and Lightning Link have not been released in online real money gaming platform just yet. Just wanted to understand what's the inhibitor there, and if there is no real inhibitor, what kind of factors should we think about, about when we can maybe expect those games to be released in the online platform?
Yeah. Thank you. Look, the no real inhibitor. For us, it's about having the right content in the right market at the right time. And so our launch, as Moti said, we've been live for about 12 months. We continue to scale across the interactive. We just thought it was prudent from our portfolio approach to make sure we had the right products in the early stages of that launch. And then as we move into scale, you'll see those games hit the roadmaps in coming months. And we've got a very specific timeline with which we want to hit those. So I can't disclose the exact timelines just yet, but we have focused on that, and we've factored that into our roadmap, so you'll see those come shortly.
Oh, this is Clemens from UBS. My question relates to the interactive business. I wanted to ask, what is the risk of business-to-consumer operators insourcing the technology stack? And with technology stack, I mean the player account management and also the content creation, given that the sort of barriers to entry for content creation is much lower than for the land-based sort of segment. So I would say there is much lower barriers to entry. So what is, like, the risk of the operators insourcing some of the interactive offerings?
It's not a risk, it's reality. And when we have factored the numbers in the market, we take into account that in certain regions in the world, the larger operator did insource their tech. There is still a good enough part of the market that does not insource tech.
I would even say that insourcing tech has seen different approaches between, for example, North America, where the largest ones have, versus when you look at Europe or even Latin America, where less operators have insourced tech, realizing that the complexity of the solutions sometimes could be achieved through a successful vendor. But the beauty of the thing is that we can work also with operators that insource tech, because if they insource their PAM, less of them insource sports betting. So we have an opportunity with that. Even less of those insource their game design. And even if they will insource game design, it's not going to be 100% of their wallet.
And we believe that the talent that we have and the game production qualities that we have, even if some of the customer will decide to have their own homegrown studios, which is great, will still allow a big enough of a market for us to go after. It's a brave, big world out there. It's not all flavors, all the same. It's only very few large operators that will insource, and I wouldn't even call it insourcing. They're trying to make sure that they put some of their own games up there as well.
We have taken all of this into consideration in our modeling, and we don't see that overnight, the large operators will have 90% of their content from their own studios, because they know that there are good vendors, such as us, with content that yields.
we expect over time that as the markets continue to mature, that there'll be a flight to quality, and that premium product, premium performance, and premium partnerships will stand out. As we've seen in our gaming business, we expect to see a similar thing start to happen in the online market as businesses become more mature. That won't stop the big operators in-housing some tech, but we've all seen some. We've also seen some operators outsource their tech after insourcing it as well. And I think it's gonna come down to where the best product, the best content, actually is then delivered to the customer, will what will be what differentiates. We feel confident that there's enough in the marketplace for us to go and attack that sector.
We might just take a few questions, online briefly, t hen we can come back to you. So Matt, a question for you from a Sydney fund manager: What are the risks in centralizing D&D at an enterprise level? How have you managed these risks?
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the question. From our perspective, we see it as great opportunity. And so why we're thinking about moving to the portfolio approach is to continue to focus, as I said earlier, having the right product in the right market at the right time is still very central to what we do. And ensuring that we have that regional focus to not just content, but all of our product strategies, has not changed.
What we're continuing to evolve is when we're making decisions and setting portfolios, we're doing that collectively and collaboratively across the organization, and we're understanding the strategic priorities of all of the business units to ensure that we're starting with the end in mind, and that we're delivering content, and we're starting the content portfolios from a starting point of knowing where we will be taking, which channels we'll be taking those products, whether they be games or others.
Thanks, Matt, and another one for you. This is from Simon Thackray at Jefferies. He's traveling in the U.S. at the moment. Just a question on digital-first game development. Does this apparently lead to a more efficient approach, and will it lead to a change in D&D as a percentage of revenue over time?
Yeah. Thank you, Simon, for the question. The first part of it, the digital-first content, something that we've been doing for quite a while, we shared, obviously, today, one of the most recent examples of the NFL products. We do believe there's efficiencies to it. The ability to through the tech investments that we've made in recent years, and we continue to make and accelerate, we're seeing those investments come to fruition. We're seeing the ability to quickly get those products into market, so there is a shorter production time from ideation to go live in digital-first and specifically in our social casino platforms. And then from there, we're able to garner player feedback very quickly and in real time. It allows the studios, again, leveraging those creative tools, to continue to iterate on those products.
And then back to my earlier point, the right product at the right time, it then gives us that opportunity. If it's the right product for our land-based business, then we go ahead and do that. There's been quite a few examples where we've taken those into the U.S. gaming market, but not here in Australia for a whole host of reasons. Those products that we spoke about today, as I said, have gone live here in Australia, in New South Wales this week. So that's, that has been a big focus for us. It, it's not something new, and, I think our, our D&D as a percentage of revenue, I think, was the second part of the question.
Look, from our perspective, that's considered, and we've given the guidance there in terms of where we're at with our percentage of D&D, and we do We are very focused on that.
Might do one more, Suresh, and then we can come back to the room here. So this is from Andre Vermeulen at UBS, and it's for you, Moti. How do you navigate iLottery opportunities between Aristocrat and the NPI JV, i.e., what criteria do you use to make these decisions, and does that get more difficult if you're succeeding outside the JV?
The JV and the partnership that we had allowed us to get into a great position in the market, and it is serving us fantastically well, and we are busy growing the revenues of the customers of the JV. We do see that new opportunities that come to the market, we are pursuing by ourselves. It, because we have a good partnership, we have not seen that impacting the JV itself, because our customers of the JV, they know that us and the Pollards are very, very focused on continuing their growth, because their success is our future success, so we are not taking our eyes off the ball there.
Okay.
Yep, three questions from my side. One, where do you think the maximum money will be made in iGaming in three or four years down the line? Is it supplying differentiated gaming content, or is it the PAM or aggregation product? Second question is, is there something that differentiates your iGaming tech stack versus what competition has? Is it, let's say, the speed of deployment? Is it how it interacts with the land gaming side of business, or is it something else there? And last question, online slots, do you think, is there a risk of a glut of online slot content in five years as more jurisdictions legalize? Because I was looking at some numbers, 600 online slots were launched in 2022, 1,100 launched in 2023.
The velocity of new online slot launch is much higher than land-based gaming, so how do you get a new Dragon Link in that 1,200 new game launch?
Thank you. Okay, so three questions that you've asked. The first one is, where would we see? First of all, the diversity of customer types and products would allow for a good diversity of our revenues as well. However, it's fair to assume that the acceleration of an opportunity for interactive exists with content, because we are only at the beginning of bringing content into that space. Gaming system are a fantastic part of our system, but they're an enabler. They will make nice revenues, but they're an enabler for us to reach where we can get with content. And we have shown time and again, by the way, that with our systems and our solutions, we can get our customers to yield more with our content and also with others.
The second question you asked about tech, we have reasons to believe that our tech is more feature-rich, and is more tightly integrated, also in cases that we have done omni-channel integration. One of the ways to demonstrate that is obviously the success that our customers have compared to using other platforms. I think that's the easiest way to compare. When you look at player values, and you see that the per capita sales or player values or other equivalents with our solutions are better than others, it's not only the games. Again, taking you back to draw games. Why? Because when you look at draw games, it eliminates instant games.
So sometimes we are asked it, by others, "Are you only successful because you have better instant games?" And I said, "I'm not going to apologize we have better instant games, but you can also look at customers that we don't have all instant games and see the success over there." The cluttered market of slots, yes, there's a lot of slots out there. We do believe, as Trevor said, that premium content will still be able to carve itself. However, we are also investing in solutions that will allow content suggestion and content navigation to players.
This industry is going to be Netflix. This is going to be streaming. This is going to be a whole world of content, and it will be about solutions that get players to where they want fast, and we are going to play a role in also helping operators achieve that.
I think just a couple of comments on that, if I can, just on top of it. I think the first part is, you know, Buffalo went into the iGaming market and took nearly 5% share instantly, one game, in 3 markets, when there's 7 markets that were being included in that survey. So there is a link between the player online and the player in the retail environment. So our operators and the players look at that link. So I think that's one part of it, and I get the comment about a lot of content, but I do believe that quality content will always stand out, as it does in the gaming business, as it does in the social casino business.
So we believe that's the case, and that's why we continue to invest and innovate and grow that content. I think on the part about what's the mix gonna be, just if you have a look at where we sit right now, we've got a scaled and strong iGaming, iLottery business already, which has got opportunity to continue to expand into new markets and to expand in performance through eInstants, et cetera. The strong CX business with a big install base, strong customer relationships, that can be built on as a platform for building out a PAM across the rest of the iGaming business. And to Mati's point, it's about how do we feed all of this content into these markets and then take our rightful share of what's out there?
All we're looking for is a rightful share, and that's a big number. We don't need states to open, we don't need states to grow through radical growth. If we get our rightful share, those three parts of the iGaming business are very attractive businesses for Aristocrat, and they're all within control of what we can do today.
Thank you.
Paul Mason.
Can we just turn that second mic on? Go, Paul.
Hey, Paul Mason from Evans and Partners here. I just wanted to ask about game development tooling. So from the answer you gave to Simon's question before, it sounds like at the moment, when you develop a game for land-based, you have to have a separate work stream to then put it into social or into iGaming, instead of sort of a develop once, launch in three verticals sort of capability. Just wanted to ask whether you've got, like, a program in place to maybe, like, find an efficiency there, or if not, what the industrial logic of, like, keeping them as separate work programs would be?
Yep. Yeah. Thank you, Paul. Yeah, the first part of your question, up to this point, we have been, as I said, delivering content with a single channel in mind. So it's probably been less about the technology and the tools and more about the focus of ensuring that we had the specificity for the market for that game and ensuring that we had the right speed to market. As we've continued to evolve and increased our investment, we have heavily invested in tools, so our speed to get from one channel to the next has drastically improved. And now for us, it's a matter of getting that portfolio planning right as we've continued to scale and open up new opportunities, and ensuring that from a regulated and unregulated standpoint, that we line up the amount of work between there.
So it's, it's not necessarily about making it once and then sort of putting it through the sausage factory and it comes out. It's about ensuring that we have the efficiencies in place through those processes and the team structures, but then also that we have the regionality of that product, whether the region is social or whether it's regulated, and ensuring that we have that. And that's really what takes the time and, and what we're taking our time to make sure that we get right, especially from an interactive standpoint.
The other thing I would say is it's also Just think about it from a display layer point of view. You've got a 42-inch screen with 9 million lines of code in a defined box. Translating that to an iPhone, translating that to an online device is a whole different configuration. So there's, to Matt's point, there's the regulatory piece, and there's the display layer level piece, and there's also making the games appropriate for the device. So as we say, we wanna provide games where people can play them wherever they choose to play, and that means not just taking it, shrinking it, and put it on a phone, 'cause if you shrunk one of those games and put it on a phone and the play format, the play experience would be completely different.
So it requires that same level of sophistication, but we have been investing in technology to start the back end to make that a lot quicker. We now need the, more of the front-end tools as we take this broader philosophy about ensuring that as we open a game up for development. We have a vision of where we want to take it, and when we want to take it to those markets, and then we develop it for that process.
Thanks. Thanks, Trevor. We might, we might do one more online and then, and then head for a cup of coffee and tea. We can come back, and you can ask those questions later . So this is from Ryan Gallagher at Jarden, who's also traveling in the U.S. at the moment. I'll direct it to you, Trevor. Good morning. Could I ask how much costs, capital, including D&D, would be required to realize your targets at $ 1 billion in revenues?
Yes. So, our aspiration is still within the commitments that we've made. So we've set a mid-range term of 11%-12% of D&D, which is what we need to continue to grow and enter those markets. And the rest of the rest of the P&L stays the same. As you know, we're looking at an efficiency program, which we've already started, and we'll continue to run through the organization. But we're able to fund our growth from the way that we have built this organization, and we're confident that that revenue target is achievable.
That's great. Well, we'll wrap up that Q&A and break for some tea and coffee. For those on the webcast, we're breaking for half an hour, give you a chance to go and make a cup of coffee as well, and we'll be back at 11:30 A.M. sharp. Thank you.
Welcome back! Can you hear me okay? So, you know, Moti talked about being new to the business and feeling a little nervous. I'm the number one thing I have to make sure is that my timer, which is not loaded up here yet, that I stick to, because I have 40 minutes. And if you don't load it, I'll never know how long it is. Okay, awesome. And I promised Trevor and Natalie that I would stick to the 40 minutes. So thank you, everyone. My name is Hector Fernandez. I'm the CEO of Aristocrat Gaming. I am based in sunny Las Vegas, or as we like to call it, a blow dryer right now in July, 'cause it's quite hot and dry and windy. So very quickly, a little bit about me.
I have the pleasure today of representing over 3,000 gaming employees globally. I get to be up here and tell the gaming story, but it's really about the people that wake up every single day and make sure we remain competitive. I think our number one competitive advantage in this business, and I'll go through several of them, is the culture that we've built. It's the people-first culture, where everyone wakes up with a singular mission, and that's how to win and win in the right way, and we'll get a little bit more into that. So I joined Aristocrat about six years ago. I joined as a CFO of the Americas. Prior to that, I spent over 15 years in Fortune 200 organizations across four different industries. And yes, I am a reformed finance person.
After about seven months in that role, I was appointed to run the Americas and the EMEA business as the president. And a couple of years ago, in 2022, I was appointed to be the CEO of Aristocrat Gaming. So with that, let's get a little bit into the gaming business. So just to give you a bit of context where gaming sits relative to the overall portfolio, we make about 56% of the overall revenue and about 67% of the profit. But my friend Moti over there is gonna make sure that that overall percentage drops over time.
It was interesting, as I was listening to Moti talk about the business and talk about just the exciting future, I get very excited by that, because if you think about some of the things that Moti talks about and the aspirations of the interactive business, they complement extremely well to the gaming business. And the strengths that we have and that we have built over time in the gaming business will help enable the interactive business. And the thing I'm actually even more excited about that is the, the opposite effect of that. Because if you hear some of the things where Moti talked about the strengths of interactive, some places like EMEA, which I'll get a little bit into, from a gaming perspective, that has not been a, a stronghold for us.
I really think it'll be a symbiotic relationship between the gaming business and the interactive business. One of the great things that getting to know Moti over the last, you know, few months is the fact that we're both very competitive, and we want to win. We want to win in the right way. Right, Moti? We understand that there is a strong dependency between both of us and both of our business, and that's a really exciting thing. Just the last thing on this chart, a lot of our growth over the last 5+ years has come from our North America performance. That makes up roughly 79%.
I share that with you because there still continues to be growth in North America, which I will get into, but it also underpins the fact that there's quite a bit of growth left outside of North America. So how do we grow this business? How do we actually go about and do this? We really start with our mission and vision, and it's really simple: It's to deliver the best seat in the house whenever and wherever the world plays. And that's an important vision that we came up with, because if you step back, it actually encompasses everything I just said about interactive and everything I could say about our social casino business as well, because it gives the player choice and optionality of how to consume our content across multiple verticals, and that's a really exciting part.
A little bit of insight about our value creation engine. One of the things we first start off with is really understanding player preferences that Matt talked about, but it's also understanding customer needs and commercial needs. We spend quite a bit of time visiting our customers in that particular region, going to the casinos around the world, and understanding their different commercial needs and the things, how they are measured. Off of that, we invest behind innovation and content, and most recently as well, as you heard a little bit in the Q&A, technology as well, to accelerate how we bring content across all three verticals. That allows us to build, well, in our opinion, an industry-best, best-in-class portfolio that cuts across multiple player segments, so it's not just one segment, and multiple commercial models.
That scale in the business that we've been able to build over the last 5+ years is what differentiates us. The commercialization element. We've always had great content at Aristocrat, content that really started in this market in Australia. One of the things we realized is we needed to get better at commercializing that content. So over the last 5 years, we've brought different capabilities that I'll get into. Things like speed of execution and our supply chain capabilities. Things like marketing and helping our customers enable bringing players in the door and commercializing our brands. And things like data analytics and insights that helps run the business even more efficiently. Out of that, we have the ability to generate really, really strong cash flows, which ultimately is drives with market share. And Trevor talked about this right at the opening.
It's everything, every single day, we wake up and say, "No matter what the market size is, we will continue to drive incremental share." And finally, but not least, is our number one social responsibility, which is really around responsible gaming. And I'll touch a little bit about that later in the slides. So just a little bit about where we operate and some of the market fundamentals. If you look at this chart, it tells you that this we operate in over $90 billion potential TAM by 2028, which represents a CAGR about 3%. This is specific to the slot machine market, so it doesn't quite tie to Trevor's global gaming TAM because that's broader. So this is where we participate in today.
If I start in the Oceania region, which represents roughly about $11 billion, where we're standing today in Australia, but that's the broader Oceania market, we believe that this market is strategically important. As we've been successful in other markets, it's, it's not a main financial driver of our business, but it's strategically important, and we will continue to invest in this market to bring the right content and hardware innovations. Things like FlexiPlay, which we then can take around the world. If you then go to Asia and the Middle East, that's another really exciting market for us because we were first movers there. But today, we're not in a number one position, but, but working very hard to get back as number one, and we'll get a little bit into that in the close around some of the growth opportunities.
Next, Europe, a very large, diversified market, highly fragmented. Today, we play in the high end of that TAM, so represents even further opportunity for growth for us. A lot of the success in, in Europe can also translate to Latin America, and it ties very nicely to Moti's strategy around interactive and, and the markets that we're gonna go after. Moti talked about Brazil, a gaming It's not a legal gaming land-based market, but as we enter that market and learn from interactive perspective, we can bring that learning to, to the land-based. Finally, North America, where we obviously have had a lot of strength and continue to have strength. North America is still a growth business for us. There's a lot of adjacencies that I will get into.
There's a lot of market share expansion, which I know I get asked that question a lot around, "What is the ceiling of market share?" But we really believe that North America still is a growth business for us. So how have we done this? Like, let's just take a look at our historical performance. We've delivered about 10% CAGR from a revenue perspective. It's about $1.4 billion of incremental revenue from 2018, or roughly over 60% growth. You may have sat in 2018 and said, "Is that the peak of the gaming business?
Has it hit maturity?" And you also may have sat through some of the global supply chain constraints and said, "What's the, what's the sustainable EBITDA margin going forward?" We're actually almost right back to our historical high of 2019, and that's while navigating through all of the supply chain constraints that we had to, while investing in new capabilities in the business. And so we're very proud of the fact that we remain very focused on delivering a high revenue growth, profitable business. So how do we, how do we do this? From 2015 - 2020, we invested in new games, things like Lightning Link and Dragon Link, that took the business by storm, and I'll give you a little bit more facts around that.
We also introduced new proprietary brands that took, you know, the, the industry by storm and allowed us to continue to grow, particularly the success we had in Australia, taking to North America. And we also invested in new hardware, things like curved monitors and virtual button decks. So again, whether you sat in 2018 or 2020, you may have said, "Is that, is that the peak?" And we looked at the business and said, "It's just the beginning." Over the next 5 years, we took some of those really successful brands, and we've extended them and created even more successful brands, things like taking Lightning Link and Buffalo and bringing them together to make Buffalo Link. We've also opened new adjacent markets, which I'll get into, expanding the TAM we participate, even in the North America region, where we're already industry leading.
And then we also look at high-value brands. We look at the player base and say, "What are the different segments of players?" And yes, I will touch a little bit on the NFL in some of the slides. And then finally, I'll talk a little bit about the resilient supply chain we have built. But at the core of everything we do, at the core of everything we do, what really paid for the beautiful food that you had outside, is the content creation that we have built. We have over 13 global studios, and we have been very strategic on where these studios are.
So we have a geographic place for each of them, and each studio essentially takes a few swim lanes of different types, either it's commercial model or players that they're going after, and they develop the industry's leading content. So how do we do this? We really call this, this coopetition element of the business. Because, in fact, the 13 global studios are highly competitive with each other, and they wake up every single day, and they think about, "How do I defeat or do better than the other studio?" But they do that in a very collaborative way. Just to give you a small glimpse, about twice a year we get together, we look at the overall product roadmap. We get two years visibility and overall product roadmap. Each studio gives feedback to the other studio.
Imagine the 13 best studios in the world giving feedback to each other how to make their games even better. The more interesting part about that, the thing that makes me sleep well at night, is the fact that it isn't just the studio heads. In these meetings, it's actually the broad group of the next level of talent, the diversity of talent, which creates future succession planning for the business. That's really, really exciting. Matt talked a little bit about the overall process, so I'm not gonna repeat kind of how, how we create content. And Matt's right, one of the things that's an opportunity for our business is how do we do a better job of scaling that content in the upfront versus post creating the content, how do we take it to different verticals?
One of the things I really want to leave you with is outside of this coopetition, which is healthy, the studios all buy into the same mission and vision. They all believe that they're trying to accomplish the same end goal, and as we invest in this, we do it in a very tightly managed process, while not impeding creativity, but ensuring that we're getting the right returns on investment. This is something that we wake up and think about every single day. We don't take for granted the fact that we talk about 11%-12% of D&D as a percentage of revenue. We actually say: How do we become more efficient so we can actually free up investment dollars to go after that next adjacency?
Because one of the things you may not see on a P&L is, in order to fund the new adjacency, we actually have to become more efficient in the base business, because you don't get that revenue upfront from that new adjacency. So you're always pre-funding growth, and that's really the mindset that we have. We produce about 100 games per year. 100 games is a lot of content, and as you see some of the performance of those games, we've gotten a lot better at what I call taking targeted shots on goal, making sure that that content resonates. Within those segments, we really think about the business in four key areas: grow, defend, attack, and innovate. In grow, we take things that we've invented, and we say, "How do we take them to the next level?" Things like hold-and-spin.
In defend, we look at areas where possibly someone else is moving into our space, where we think, Hey, we can actually do it better because we invented that particular whether it's mechanic or style of game. In attack, it's an area where maybe we don't participate in today, like an adjacency, where we say any new adjacency we enter, it's actually incremental share to us, and it's share losing from someone else. And in innovate, the hardest part of all, we believe, as the market leader, we have a responsibility to innovate for that future casino player. And that's hard, because it's a lot easier to build on the success that you've already had, a lot harder to innovate. And we're very methodical about how much percentage of investment we make in this category. And you heard Matt talk about we're very targeted, we're very data-driven.
The NFL is a good example of how we've innovated. Because you may look at the NFL and you may say, "Oh, it's not performing at whatever house average." But the piece that's hard to peel back from some of those indices is the fact, is it attracting a different player base? And if the answer is it's attracting a different player base from a customer standpoint, that makes a lot of sense. They're gonna understand that if you can bring, Matt talked about, that younger, more male, more sports betting crowd that we saw come into a casino floor during COVID, that is a different value proposition to them than, you know, a, a specific index on a premium game.
So next, I just wanted to give you a small flavor of the content that we have, and just a small flavor of the commercial models we operate in. So first, starting with our top premium lease games. So games like Jackpot Carnival, things like, obviously, Dragon Link, Buffalo Link, and Bank Busters. This portfolio is what gave us the ability to deliver the first half of 3,200 net gaming ops units, which just to remind everyone from an industry perspective, that was essentially the entire growth of the industry. Next, our Class II recurring revenue. We don't spend a lot of time talking, and I'm gonna spend a little bit of time delving into the tribal segment because it's such an important part of our business.
But we've been able to take titles that resonated from the VGT acquisition, and we've been able to build on that success to create even further innovation, and that has further cemented our footprint in Oklahoma and the broader Class II market. We then take the opportunity to take targeted shots on goal. We look at the landscape, and in fact, today, the hardest thing with third-party brands is saying no. Today, we actually get a lot of inbounds from lots of different people around the world or great brands, where they want a slot machine. And the hardest thing is we do our due diligence, we follow the data, and most of the time we say no, because we want to make sure we pick the right ones, but more importantly, that we focus on building our organic brands.
Then finally, in this top core, it's very difficult, and I'll share a little bit of the slides as well in the future, to make this trade-off between premium and core. So Aristocrat historically became very strong in the premium premium segment, but five years ago, we were not the number one player in the core segment. And the reason that is, it's because it's very hard to make trade-offs between premium and core. Because ultimately, one is recurring revenue, and one, you sell a box with one game. But ultimately, what you're trying to do from a customer perspective is you're trying to deliver overall value. So what do customers think about this? I'm not going to get into the stats on the left.
I'll let you read this, and I'm going to quote one industry stat because I think we're really proud about that, is the fact that we've been, for 6 years in a row, the number 1 overall supplier. That's a very difficult thing to do. That means that every single day, you gotta wake up, and you gotta be humble and hungry, and know that someone's coming after you, every day. So every day, we wake up and think: How do we disrupt ourselves? How do we come up with the next Dragon Link? How do we come up with the next innovation? And the studios are designed to do that. But the customer feedback, which we measure, twice a year, outside of regular conversations with our customers, but this is a data-driven exercise.
We do a formal NPS survey with our customers, where they fill out and give us real feedback, anonymous feedback. And I'm happy to share that, in the NPS, the last NPS we just ran, our tribal customers rate us a 70, or excellent, outperforming all other competitors. Additionally, 85% of our customers said that our product performance was better than our competitors. And then finally, 100% of our customers said that our product made their business better. That's not something we take for granted. This is why we measure it all the time. This is why we spend so much time seeing our customers, to get real-time feedback. So let's take a look at, from a gaming operations, how have we done? We've brought premiumization on the casino floor.
If you look at the latest third-party survey, we're performing at about 2.9 times house average, over a 60% premium to our next competitor. In fact, this is the number I, I love, is the fact that we've installed 17,000 net gaming operations units from 2018 - 2023. If you look at our next two closest competitors, they lost 700. What does that tell you? That tells you that we not only grew share, we actually grew the market. We grew the penetration of gaming ops as a percentage of an overall casino floor because our customers recognize the value to their business. To give you a bit more context of the 17,000, back in 2015, at the beginning of some of these graphs, we had less than 10,000 Class III recurring revenue units.
Less than 10,000 back in 2015. Over the last five years, from 2018 - 2023, we grew to 17,000. You can see that from a market share perspective. But the other thing that's really important is the price premium we've been able to command in the market relative to the performance. Because when we talk to customers, we don't talk about price, we talk about value and return on invested capital, and you can see that in the revenue share numbers. Next, outright sales. I talked a little bit about this dilemma between how do you create content that you put in a recurring revenue commercial model, and how do you create content that you put in a core model or for sale model? Matt talked a little bit about this digital-first content.
Bao Zhu is a perfect example of that. Bao Zhu was a game that one of our studios launched digitally first in 2-3 different formats and tested it. Out of that, they picked the characters that resonate most with a social casino player, and they picked the colors that resonated more. Out of that, they took that content, and they tailored it to a land-based environment, and that's how Bao Zhu was born. Bao Zhu became the number 1 performing core product at launch, and as we've taken that brand globally, it's actually resonated. It just went live in the Philippines. Bao Zhu is an example of how we create organic brands in this business because it's about a portfolio approach and the ability to leverage those organic brands.
Whisker Wheels is another really good example of another studio creating this industry leading from a performance standpoint. The other thing we've done is we have a diversified hardware offering. So anyone that goes to a casino, and I think I have the honor of probably going to the most casinos globally out of anybody in this room. If you go to a casino and you see the same box, it's pretty boring. I think like all things in life, like going to a supermarket and seeing the same setup everywhere. And so we've created this diversity on the floor. So as there's new openings and expansions, there was just recently one in the locals market. We can come to market with a portfolio that helps our customers be successful day one. And you can see our growth in outright chip share.
From, you know, starting in 2018 at 17%, we've grown that eight percentage points to 23%. And we've, we've priced with innovation, because if you look at our outright revenue share, we've actually been able to price with innovations because our customers recognize that return that they see on their casino floor. So let's take a closer look in how we think about brands and our strategy behind brands. Matt talked a little bit about this, but Buffalo is a great example. When we first launched Buffalo and Buffalo Gold, we placed over 10,000 units in the market. We realized that that brand had brand affinity and brand equity across the entire casino floor. So instead of just creating one brand, we took that success, and we built upon it.
Most recently, we launched Buffalo Ultimate Stampede, which became the number one new premium game. We then took a lot of that learning, and we launched Buffalo Triple Power in our Class II portfolio, which also became a top-performing game in that market. But we didn't stop there. That's the beauty of this business, is the scale that we've been able to build. We've launched Buffalo and Product Madness, our social casino business, and you heard Trevor talk about we launched Buffalo and Interactive. And at launch, despite the thousands of different slot games out there, it was able to cut through all that noise. The brand affinity that it has with the player and it was able to deliver nearly over 4% of the GGR, despite the fact that we only competed in three markets.
And that's the exciting part of the scale part that we talked about, that Moti talked about, and the opportunity ahead of us. We've done that with hardware. So our legacy VGT infrastructure, where we took known brands in a mechanical reel that a player learned how to play in, particularly in Oklahoma, and we brought our video capabilities and expanded that and put it into video. And, Mr. Moneybags Makes a Mint is the number one top indexing new game in Class II. And now we're taking it one step further. We're taking their favorite sidekicks, and we're creating whole brand extensions of portfolios on a casino floor. So we're taking some of the, the—whether it's the dog in one of the games, and we're featuring that in a very, you know, in a standalone game, taking that brand affinity to the next level.
Dragon Link, my favorite story, arguably one of the best game created in this industry. It's live in over 20 countries globally. Dragon Link has given us the opportunity to bring a hybrid model to Asia for the first time ever. So when we went on this route to say, "Hey, we're gonna build this game for the Asia market," we understood that it wasn't just about bringing Dragon Link, Australian math, or North America version to Asia. We understood that it wasn't just about tweaking the content, but it's actually understanding the player behaviors in that market. And the studio spent quite a significant time understanding the player behaviors and learning what was successful there. We are now live with Dragon Link, Dragon Link in Asia on a hybrid model.
Just to remind everyone, a hybrid model, we sell the box, and we charge a software license, a daily software license. And the success that's having in Asia By the way, doing that is very hard from a customer perspective in a market that traditionally is only purchased. But as the game performed, it was validating because, again, customers are looking and saying, "What is the return on invested capital for that?" So Dragon Link is a great success story of how we've been able to take a great industry-leading game and then expand it geographically. Not to mention how eventually we will take it to the interactive segment as well. And then NFL, a little bit about NFL. So a new player segment we are trying to go after, but we also- so much of this business is about winning that real estate footprint.
You have to win that every single day. And when we launched the first NFL title, which, by the way, the NFL is not just one game, we launched 5 titles in different segments, and we've learned a lot. So I look forward to showing you at G2E season two of the NFL, where we will bring new content and take the learnings that we have built upon to create an even better portfolio. And as we launch it digitally as well, through our social casino business, we're gonna take even more of that learning and strengthen that brand. And I think that's really exciting. So let's dive a little bit into our tribal gaming, because I said we sometimes don't spend a lot of time talking about that. So just some quick facts. 29 states in the U.S. have tribal gaming, 29, over 500 casinos.
So over 50%, roughly, of casinos in North America are tribal, which represents nearly 400,000 slots and nearly $41 billion of GGR. In Moti's presentation, he talked about lotteries. In the land-based business, tribal is a lot like the lottery business. They're long-term relationships. They're based on trust, doing what you say you're gonna do. They run their business from a generational standpoint. It's not just about the next 13 weeks. It's about what are they gonna leave for their generations and the legacy that they leave going forward. And ultimately, they take the wins that they make in that setting, and they invest back in their local communities. So they build hospitals and schools, something that we're very proud of to participate in.
Not only is tribal business such an important part of our own business, it's actually, we wanna be in the community. We've been there since day one, and we've partnered with an organization called AISES, which is a STEM organization that services the Native American population, and we've done donations and created scholarships and opportunities for that next wave of Native American talent to come into the business and learn about it. But just don't take my word for it. I'd like to introduce Chuck Garrett. Chuck Garrett - he's not gonna come out, by the way, it's a video. Chuck Garrett is the CEO of Cherokee Nation Businesses. It is the number one tribe in North America with over 400,000 members.
Now, I'm not going to steal any of Chuck's thunder, except for one number I want you to pay close attention to, which is the $1.2 billion that he quotes.
Hello, I'm Chuck Garrett, Chief Executive Officer for Cherokee Nation Businesses. I'm proud of our relationship with Aristocrat, which goes back decades and is a true partnership. Everything our company does is for the betterment of the Cherokee Nation. The partnership between Aristocrat and us helps us achieve our mission and improves the lives of Cherokee citizens and future generations. Our gaming operations, which employ roughly 5,000 people and make up nearly half of our gross revenue, has been one of the driving forces behind the more than $1.2 billion we have contributed to the Cherokee Nation in the form of an annual dividend. Our future with Aristocrat is bright. Our confidence in Aristocrat is evident, as we are currently working on a new agreement to expand Aristocrat's footprint within our business. We look forward to growing together.
Thank you, Chuck. Not a transactional business. This is a long-term business where we've invested behind bespoke Class II content to enable the tribe to be successful. Next, I'd like to shift to supply chain. So when I talked a little bit about the supply chain constraints and the challenges that we had as a result of that. We took that from a challenge perspective, and we've converted that into a core competency that we've built on. We took the opportunity as we navigated through those uncharted waters, by the way, uncharted to everyone in their entire careers, to simplify our global supply chain, to get closer to even second and third customer suppliers down the chain.
I was very happy in 2022, we took the opportunity to upgrade our facility in Oklahoma that particularly focuses on remanufacturing of content, and we opened the new Tulsa Integration Center. So brand new facility we opened from the ground up to upgrade the old one we used to have that we had outgrown. In about 5 days, if I can do that math correctly, July 1st, I think it's Wednesday today, we will open our new Las Vegas Integration Center. This is a really exciting time because our current integration center in Las Vegas, we really outgrew 2 years ago, and we've been working really hard to create as much efficiency in this very constrained space, given the business trajectory.
This new Las Vegas Integration Center, which again opens July 1st, will give us the opportunity to grow into our future over the next 5 + 10 years. It's really exciting. Just a couple of fun facts around it, 265,000 sq ft of production, about 120,000 sq ft of finished goods. That's important because today we have multiple off-site storage facilities, so we're consolidating that footprint to drive more efficiency. Despite it being a new facility, we worked really hard to make sure it was ISO 9001 certified. So really exciting time. So how much growth is left in this business?
When I think about globally, where our footprint is and the opportunities that we have going forward, I mentioned a bit. Australia is a very strategically important market for us, and we will continue to be competitive here by bringing novel games, content, and hardware into this market. We've also introduced the hybrid model in Australia, which gives our customers choice around how they want to consume content, and we've had success there as well. Next, Asia. So we were just at G2E Asia about 2-3 weeks ago, and had the opportunity to go to Singapore, Manila, and Macau for the show. So if you start at Singapore, one of the things that our customers told us about 3 years ago was this need for new novel hardware. We call it the slim cabinet.
Some of the constraints from a footprint standpoint in Singapore as they look to expand their business, we were the only manufacturer to take that challenge on and launch the slim cabinet in that market. So, the next time you're in either of the two properties in Singapore, I encourage you to go take a look, because it's quite novel what we're able to do, and our customers have rewarded us as a result of that. If you then look at Manila, fastest-growing GGR, in fact, the number one GGR in the Asia market now. And President Marcos just recently said that his goal, one of his stated goals of his administration, is to make the Philippines an integrated resort destination.
We have very strong partnerships there, with a lot of growth left to take from a market share standpoint and as things expand in that market. Next, Macau, which, as we all know, experienced the fastest closures from a COVID perspective, and then has experienced the slowest recovery. It was very exciting to be there to talk to customers. It was interesting. We didn't talk to customers about slots. We talked to customers about their business. What were their commercial needs? What are the challenges they were facing? How could we help them recover? There were such good meetings that some of our customers actually asked us to come back. Again, not even at G2E Asia, coming back to their property to further that discussion, some of those commercial capabilities we've been able to build.
So there's a lot of growth left in Asia, and it's very exciting. And that's not even to mention some of the expansions potentials in Vietnam and Cambodia, and the fact that Thailand is now talking about legalizing gaming, or the fact that Japan is scheduled to open up in the next five years. So Asia continues to be a growth business for us with lots of opportunity. Next, Europe, which is actually bigger than North America. But just to remind you, like I said at the onset, highly fragmented, region. And so we only play in the high end or a very small percentage of the TAM. So our strategy is going to be to continue to further penetrate via share gains and then to expand that TAM that's available for us. Lots of growth left in that market.
And that some of that growth will also translate to Latin America, and we will work with Interactive to leverage not just attacking the market from a land-based standpoint, but attacking it from an interactive standpoint, and then building that business across the three verticals. And last but not least, North America, where we wake up every single day and understand that one share point in North America is worth roughly AUD 70 million in revenue. It's a massive market for us, and we have to remain competitive there, and we believe there's still plenty of room to take share. You heard Chuck talk about it. The future is bright, the partnership is strong, and we wake up every single day, and we don't take that for granted. There's also the adjacent markets. So let me just get a little bit into the adjacent markets.
We entered New York Lottery in 2022 with a TAM of 15,000 units. It was a competitive RFP bid with two incumbent players, a duopoly, essentially. We've had the ability to start to penetrate that market, and we're building really strong momentum. Without getting into any disclosures, we're very happy with some of the latest performance in that market. Next, historical horse racing, a new market similar to Class II. Instead of a random number generator, it's based on a historical horse, horse race outcome. We entered that market in 2023, and continue to see success there as well. Moti talked a little bit about Canada and some of the opportunities with the VLTs, and the fact that, like, PlayAlberta is a fully integrated customer. We're actually under-penetrated in the Canadian VLTs, and so there's a lot of growth opportunity there as well.
And then finally, Georgia COAM, a market that we entered in March of this year, and the early read from performance standpoint is we're revolutionizing that market because we're bringing some of our industry-leading content. By the way, two of our global studios are actually based in that market, and they're really excited to participate there, so we view that as another growth opportunity. So with that, I'd like to share the video on responsible gaming, and before I share the video, I just want to say a couple of things. One, we take this very seriously. We think about this every single day. This, this initiative that we created actually was a combination of commercial, marketing, and the responsible gaming team coming together and building something that would resonate with a player.
I'm happy to say that this particular video and advertisement has seen over 200 million impressions globally, more than any other marketing campaign that we've ever done.
Welcome to Max HQ.
Hey, Max. Hey, Max.
Hello there, Max.
Hey, Max!
Let's make sure that we eat this at home next time.
Yeah!
Hey, I think this might help. When you're playing, always set a limit with your time and budget, and stick to it.
Hey, who's hungry? Yeah. Yeah.
Know Your Max. Be a positive player.
Great thing about Max, Max can be me, Max can be you, Max can be anyone, and that's the power of that campaign. We can replace Max to look like dark, lots of different people as we take it globally. So finally, I'd like to end with some key messages, some key takeaways I wanna make sure you leave the room with. Number one, we play in a very large and stable environment and market, and our aspirations is to continue to take share every single day, and we are strategic and methodical about how we place those investments to grow for the future. We're very smart about prioritizing our capital choices. We have competitive advantages, whether it's commercial, whether it's customer relationships, whether it's long-term deals, whether it's the commercial offerings and the content and the breadth of the portfolio.
We've been very successful in gaining share and driving share behind those investments, and we've been very methodical. There's lots of growth left in this business, lots of growth, attributed by some of the adjacencies that I talked about and some of the regional opportunities that we still have left. And finally, but most importantly, our commitment to RG, because at the end of the day, we're very competitive, very competitive, and we wanna win, but we wanna win in the right way. So with that, I'd like to pass it over to Sally Demby, our CFO, who will talk about Pixel. Sally?
Hey. Thanks, Hector.
Two minutes left.
Oh, tough act to follow, Hector. Hello, everybody. For those that don't know me, I'm Sally Demby. I'm the CFO of Aristocrat. I've been with the organization for around, around nine years now in senior finance roles, and I took the CFO role coming up to two years ago now. I'm gonna talk to you today about Pixel United. This is one of our three businesses, and it's a business that's gone through both significant growth and change over the past couple of years. So Pixel United is our mobile, social, free-to-play gaming business. Like gaming and interactive, Pixel operates in the B2C space, and its content is not subject to gaming regulation. It represents about 40% of our group revenues and about 30% of our profits.
We operate across three diverse genres, social casino representing roughly 60% of our revenues and the majority of our profits, and we are the market leader in social slots. We've got scale, and we're able to leverage off our gaming content within this genre. We also operate in strategy and RPG, which includes our segment-leading squad RPG title, Raid, which most of you will be familiar with, and in social casual, we're a top five player in the merge segment. The business has been resilient over the years, offering diversification to our portfolio and providing exceptionally strong performance and cash flow, particularly during the COVID years.
While performance has moderated over the last couple of years, what you can see from the charts is Pixel has generated a 12% CAGR in terms of revenue and 11% CAGR in terms of profit over the five-year period, and gained share in the mobile gaming market. As a B2C distribution channel, Pixel United has also brought significant intangible benefits to the group, and it has allowed us to build exceptional digital capabilities in the form of LiveOps and features, improved our understanding of direct-to-consumer marketing and platforms, and also provided a channel to test and leverage land-based concepts, content , as you've heard from both Matt and Hector today.
Now, taking a look at the overall gaming, mobile gaming market, it's roughly an $80 billion U.S. dollar, I should say, revenue business market, and it experienced mixed growth rates across the genres, each exhibit different consumer dynamics. Although social casino actually represents the smallest TAM in the three genres, it—we participate in niche segments in both the casual and RPG strategy and action genres, which compares to social casino, which is predominantly social slots, and we are a leader in that market. Prior to COVID, industry experts expected the digital market to grow at a CAGR of roughly 12%-14%. However, during COVID, what you saw was that growth accelerated to over 20%, and then it subsequently moderated as consumers have returned back to live experiences.
The social gaming market has recently stabilized and returned to growth, primarily led by the social casual segment. In fact, the total market is expected to be larger at the end of 2024 than it was in the peak period during COVID of 2021. Want to unpack the industry transition a little bit more now. Changes in Apple's IDFA policies have made targeting consumers more expensive, and marketing dollars have actually become less effective compared to the pre-COVID years. As a result, we've seen reduced downloads and low return on user acquisition spending across the industry. This has raised the bar and made it generally more expensive to launch new titles, longer development times, and lower success rates. From a Pixel United perspective, we've benefited from the quality of our portfolio of well-established brands.
Titles such as RAID are demonstrating they can sustain loyalty of their player base. Today, our portfolio has over 80% of bookings now generated by games that are older than 2 years. If you go back 5 years ago, that was only 55%. This has been achieved by shifting investment to LiveOps and features in order to keep games fresh and retain loyal players. Despite this, it is still possible to launch successful games, and Monopoly GO! has demonstrated that over the past year. So we continue to invest in our pipeline. I'll show you. I don't know how the rest of them did it without water. Sorry. Okay. So let me discuss these choices with you in a little bit greater detail, and we've outlined here some of our key initiatives that we've had in play.
Firstly, we're focusing on our core competitive advantages in content development and rationalizing our pipeline to lean forward in areas where we have well-developed capabilities. This includes focusing on the social slot genre, where we're able to achieve greater scale benefits through spending on content creation alongside our gaming business, and also leverage capabilities and franchise relationships, like the NFL, across the group platform. We've been tactically pivoting our growth strategy to retention from acquisition. This is an approach to growth that may change over time should the market change, and we are adjusting our UA spend dynamically to reflect our portfolio mix and maximize our return on advertising spend, also ROAS.
Supporting the shift to retention, we're investing in LiveOps and also pursuing integrated marketing strategies that focus on driving loyalty and engagement in the existing player base, rather than a reliance on new users coming into the games. Next, as you've already heard today, and consistent across the portfolio, we are collaborating more effectively and centralizing some decision-making. Hand in hand, product and technology teams are working towards a common tech platform, which will enable increased speed and agility across all of our businesses. We've also focused on growing off-platform distribution as an additional way to improve margins with strong progress across Plarium and a good early start in the Product Madness business. And finally, we have reprioritized our pipeline. Data and insights are playing a significantly more prominent role in assessing opportunities and how we can leverage our strengths.
I'll now touch on a few more of these in some depth. Social Casino remains at our core, and we're really proud of the exceptional track record in this genre. Over the past 5 years, we've grown our Social Casino business at a CAGR of 11% and continue to invest behind the high-value segment, and our land-based capabilities will continue to help Pixel maintain the market leadership that we have in this genre. Social Casino remains attractive, with an engaged player base that requires lower UA investment and exhibits a higher lifetime value compared to many of the other genres. We've not only grown revenues in social slots, but we've also taken share, reaching over 21% share in the latest reporting period.
This marked a reversal from 2018 - 2020, when, in fact, Product Madness, to be frank, lacked, lacked in its deployment of the LiveOps . However, beginning in 2021, we leveraged the full power of the Pixel United portfolio, bringing LiveOps capabilities from Big Fish and Plarium to bear across the Social Casino apps. We also increased collaboration with gaming from a content perspective, and as a result, the business has consistently gained share in social slots in recent years. We expect this to continue in what remains a very competitive market. As the market has changed, we've recognized that we've needed to change, too. We've adapted our strategy and our approach to portfolio optimization, and we have moderated our top-line growth expectations and shifted focus to carefully balance the trade-off between user acquisition spending and LiveOps and profitability.
In summary, we are, and have been, making active choices on strategy and investment for all of our games based on lifecycle and available opportunities in front of us. User acquisition, or UA spend, has been a significant driver of Pixel's performance for years, helping to attract new players across our portfolio of games. We've always managed this critical component of our investment slate dynamically to reflect the opportunities in front of us and to ensure appropriate ROAS, returns on advertisement spend. During COVID, we increased the UA from our historical levels of 24%-27% to 26%-29% to support new game launches during the period and take advantage of growth opportunities that we saw at that point in time.
More recently, as you have seen in the results for the last two halves, we have actually reduced our UA spend to within a range of 21%-24%. This reflects a number of different drivers. Firstly, a shift in the portfolio mix towards social casino, which, as I've said, actually requires lower UA investment, our increased focus on ROAS and more tightly targeting UA opportunities across our portfolio, and the reprioritization of our new games pipeline. We'll continue to support future game launches and appropriate levels of UA to maximize their chances of success where we see the opportunities, while dynamically managing the UA spend to ensure that we maintain appropriate returns. While we've reduced UA spending, we've increased our investment in LiveOps and features, so I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about that.
This keeps our games fresh and engages with our loyal players. Our capabilities in these areas were significantly enhanced through our acquisitions of Plarium and Big Fish. As a great example, this slide depicts the introduction of a rolling offer feature, which was first launched in Cashman Casino in December 2023. Following its initial success, the Cashman team actually shared the positive results with the other Product Madness teams, who were quickly then able to apply these learnings to their own products. So in both Heart of Vegas and Lightning Link, they quickly adapted this LiveOps feature and saw great success. This rapid turnaround was enabled by a shared tech stack, shared processes, and a strong culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Another recent example was RAID's launching of new features such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Monster Hunters to coincide with the integrated marketing campaigns and promotions around its fifth anniversary. This led to a steady pickup of momentum across the March quarter and ultimately produced the title's highest ever bookings month in March, despite the reduction in the UA spend. These content-oriented investments are primarily allocated to D&D spend, in part contributing to the increase in D&D over the past two years. We'd now like to showcase some of the LiveOps and features that have underpinned Pixel United's success with a short video. Traditionally, adding new game content and features required subsequent game releases or sequels, requiring players to install new or updated apps rather than being deployed into the existing launch product.
LiveOps allows game development teams to continually deliver new features, updates, promotions, in-game events, and improvements within a current game, improving the overall player experience and removing the friction of having to redownload an app. This requires deeper operational expertise and can unlock new player engagement strategies. Okay, play the video. So the first one we're gonna talk to you is Dream House. In Dream House, you collect golden tickets. Those golden tickets enable you to actually upgrade the furnishings in your room. You do this room by room, ultimately build your dream house. What we saw with this was amazing engagement from the players, and 60% of the players actually engaged with the product. The next one is Capture Bunny. Again, released over an Easter period, so seasonal. It's a Whac-A-Mole-style game. In this one, you actually collect nets.
With those nets, you then go and catch a bunny. Once you've caught the bunny, that unlocks rewards and allows you to progress to the next level, and as you go through, that progression gets harder. Then this one, Snowy's Christmas and Summer Adventures, probably the cutest one. On this one, you actually spin a wheel to collect candies. Those candies allow you to actually feed Snowy the reindeer, and you watch Snowy grow, and as Snowy grows, so do the rewards that you get in that game. And again, this was like a gacha style of game that was very successful, and we moved across to the Lightning Link product as well. So some cute characters there and some fun with LiveOps .
Now I'd like to comment a little bit more on the increased coordination, not just across Pixel, but across Aristocrat as a whole. As you heard from Matt and the other business lines, we're increasingly taking a coordinated, enterprise-level approach to product strategy and dissemination of best practices across the company. We've long leveraged our leading land-based portfolio of games across mobile. However, we also have a strong pipeline of digital-first slots, which we use to rapidly test new features, including various mechanics and math models at a lower cost. Successful features, as well as brands themselves, can then be leveraged in land-based games, contributing to the overall efficiency and success, success rate of the portfolio. Further, as we bring NeoGames on board and continue to scale Interactive, we see significant opportunities to learn from each other.
And leverage our joint DNA in terms of content, features, and distribution. Cash Spark and Charming Cat are two early examples where we are leveraging features and learnings from Pixel in the development of games in Interactive. And as we continue to progress our technology roadmap, we expect to achieve further efficiencies in cross-channel deployment, regardless of the origin. We've also revised our pipeline development process to improve our chances of success, and are focused on developing best-in-class capabilities across four operational pillars. Firstly, building pipeline capability to improve idea generation and bringing carefully targeted talent and ideas. Improving the greenlight process to better validate concepts and improve speed of execution in terms of progressing things through the pipeline or killing off the games earlier. This enhances our confidence in the quality of the initiatives we move forward.
Next, improving our execution around game development and launch through sharing of best practices, enhanced testing capabilities, and ensuring key milestones are achieved in order to progress. Further work in this area is underway to build our more comprehensive playbook of best practice. And then finally, once the game is live, improving our capabilities around insights, analytics, and customer feedback, and looping those insights back into the funnel to be leveraged in future game development. You've heard a little bit about NFL and our latest example of cross, cross-platform collaboration and pipeline development. It follows on from the successful rollout of the NFL land-based games, and we're hard at work with our first NFL-themed social slot game. The project involves several gaming and Pixel United studios working together and leverages mechanics and features as well as consumer insights from gaming in the development process.
Similar to our land-based games, we expect the NFL Social Casino app to bring new demographics to the social slots category, and we expect the strength of the NFL brand to reduce our cost of acquisition. This is an exciting opportunity that also expands our relationship with the NFL. To summarize for Pixel, the mobile market is undergoing significant structural change, and in response, we are making proactive choices to adapt our business to this new world. We have strong competitive advantages in social slots from leveraging our leading land-based content. In our casual and RPG businesses, we're driving retention and are focused on optimized user acquisition, and are successfully applying integrated marketing campaigns combined with LiveOps and features to sustain our business.
We've increased collaboration across studios and business units, streamlined our pipeline development process, and are leveraging common tech platforms to improve our speed, agility, and success rate. And finally, we are driving margin expansion through optimizing UA spend and our focus on cost optimization, providing capacity for further reinvestment in growth. Okay. My last page, and I'm going to close up on my day job. So I'd like to touch on a couple of our capital allocation on capital allocation. Just remembering that our number one priority is organic investment, followed by strategic M&A to supplement the portfolio as needed. I'll touch a little bit on D&D. Matt spoke a little bit about it earlier.
We are running at 12%-13% of revenue, which is above our historic range of 11%-12%, but driven by the fact that we're in the middle of a cycle of investment, particularly with Interactive. We do target to get back to 11%-12% in the medium term, and I think you've heard today, cost efficiencies, a more centralized approach on product, and the scaling of Interactive will all support us getting to that place. As part of our overall strategy, we do review our portfolio to make sure that we've got the right mix of assets and capabilities to optimize our return on capital.
As we announced only a few weeks ago at the half-year results, we do have a strategic review into play with our social, casual, and mid-core assets that sit within Big Fish Games and, and Pixel. Just reminding everybody that the Big Fish Casino games were moved into Product Madness about 18 months ago, so they're not within the portfolio. With near closing and the scaling of Interactive, we've got about 85% of our revenues now coming from slots, and so it's the right time for us to evaluate those products within our portfolio. You can appreciate we're only 5-6 weeks away from when we made the announcement, so no decisions have been made.
We continue to look at all options, and the main goals are maximizing both shareholder returns and making sure that we've got the ongoing success for those businesses. Finally, just want to recap on capital management. I know you've probably all seen this before many times. Number one priority is organic. We do that through D&D user acquisition, and then CapEx, largely supporting our North American gaming ops install base. Strategic M&A to supplement gaps that we may have in the portfolio, and we're proactively out there looking at what we want and what we're interested in. And then finally, our commitment to return cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks. We do recognize that our balance sheet gearing is not within the target range at the minute-
We do continually look at capital allocation and our choices, and as the outcome of the strategic review becomes clear, we'll be transparent and share that with you as those thinkings evolve. So with that, I want to say thank you. I'm going to get some heat from Moti and Hector, because I've actually gone 1 minute over, which was never the intention. But with that, I'd like to have Hector and Trevor join me back, and we'll do Q&A. Thank you.
Thanks, Sally. So we'll run Q&A in much the same way that we did earlier. So we are back on time now. We'll still aim to finish up by 1:00 P.M. We'll conclude with Trevor saying a few closing remarks. And then that's the day. So feel free to call this afternoon if there's anything else that you want to clarify. But over to Q&A. So starting in the room and webcast, please go ahead and launch questions.
Hi, it's Adrian Lemme again from Citi. Hector, I appreciate, you know, you're running a big portfolio of games. You have talked about NFL, and that was a key driver in the first half. You'd mentioned before that the performance has been falling, and you've got season two coming out and new variants. But can you talk to any other games that you've had that have maybe sort of had that performance fall back, but then you've come out with, you know, the next round of releases and it's picked up again, or it's been a big success? Yeah, just so we can get a feel for that, please.
I would say every game we've ever launched, because there's a natural life cycle of performance, right? So if you look at, I'll give you an example of probably the best example I can give you. Lightning Link revolutionized the market with the hold-and-spin and did really, really well. And over time, it actually sustained performance for way longer than most games. But over time, it did start to decline from a performance standpoint, and the studios worked on Dragon Link, which further took that to the next level. And then it didn't stop with Dragon Link. Then we came up with Dollar Storm, which actually started off really slow from a market perspective and actually grew really strong. And then we created Buffalo Link and Lightning Dollar Link.
So we do have a strong record of launching content in the market, understanding what resonate, what resonated with the player, and then building on those learnings for that next evolution of content. Just to remind everyone, the NFL was going after a new demographic. We understood that we had the responsibility to try to monetize that sports player, and it's done that. It's done exactly that. The other piece about the NFL was, it was the fastest-growing WAP we've ever launched, and the WAP commercial model is by far the hardest one to commercialize in the market. The first step is winning that floor space or that carpet space. What we've done, and part of the NFL strategy, was to create content behind the NFL.
So as customers maybe didn't want it off their floor because it wasn't performing, although we're not seeing a material impact to that. We had content that came behind that to continue to keep that floor space. But thinking about the ability to commercialize WAP at such a high rate with a brand like the NFL has been very, very successful. Part of the reason why in first half earnings we guided to a total net gaming ops install base for the fiscal year, because we had visibility to the pipeline, we had visibility to the commercial pipeline, we had visibility to the roadmap, and we felt confidence in our ability to deliver that net growth for the fiscal year.
Thank you.
Hey, Hector. Three questions for me. One, can you talk to the Philippines opportunity for the next 2-3 years with integrated resort development and offline to online channel that the government has passed? How big is the opportunity and where can your market share be for Philippines, especially? Second, gaming-
Can I start with the first one? Because I'll forget your first one.
Yeah. Go ahead.
Uh, yeah.
Go ahead.
So Philippines is a great opportunity for our business. And if you look at the expansion that's happened in that market, particularly in a post-COVID world, it really has taken over the Asia growth. And we still believe we have plenty of runway in that market. And part of that market is creating content that resonates with that player base. So we've worked really hard from a portfolio standpoint and with the studios to understand that different dynamic that exists. There is a growing opportunity that you're starting to see in the Philippines. By the way, the other thing we did, I didn't mention in the presentation, was we've also opened an office in Entertainment City in Manila, and we were the first and only manufacturer to this point to have a PAGCOR-approved showroom.
So we're showing the government that not only are we entering the market, but we're actually making strategic investments in that market. So we have very strong relationships with the regulatory environment there as well. As you think about the You know, you're talking about the physical slot machine with the camera and a player being able to play online. We look at that as an opportunity. We're obviously evaluating some of the regulatory elements behind that. We're very methodical around when we enter a jurisdiction, because if you think about the scale and the strength of our business and being licensed over 300 jurisdictions, we take that very seriously. So it is a growth opportunity for us.
I didn't cover it because it's not contemplated in this, because we're going to be very methodical around as it legalizes, what are the regulatory rules around it, and making sure that we're following all of those.
A couple of questions. One, do you see, when you talk to operators, are they growing the floor, which is, which is on gaming ops? Is that as a share floor going up in the next one or two years? And last question, any thoughts around electronic table games? Would you look to enter that at some point?
Okay, so, your second, okay, your second question, let me, let me talk about ETGs, and then you're gonna have to ask me your second question again, because I forgot it. So ETGs, look, we look. Trevor talked about this. Part of the strategic review is doubling down on our strategic, where we've been successful, and that's really been around slots. It doesn't mean that every day we don't look at the other markets or the other segments in that TAM and say: Is it a growing TAM? Is it something we could be successful in? Do we have unique commercial or development capabilities that we could take that business to the next level? Sally talked about this. It's we, we are strategic about M&A. We use M&A as an accelerator of the strategy, not just because we want to be in a particular segment.
Like, what was your second question? Sorry.
Gaming ops impact growing and the share of the-
Ah, thank you. Yes. So one of the things you saw in a post-COVID world is CapEx was very limited, and you saw this resurgence of performance on titles that players loved. As a result, just like we run a business, our casino partners run a business as well, and they looked and said: What is the right return on invested capital? Where are we going to allocate our dollars? And so we did see that footprint, that penetration as a percentage of the total growth, and in fact, we took a disproportionate percentage of that footprint. Every operator looks at that every, you know, every year in their planning cycle and says: How do we want to invest that next wave? And so we don't take for granted that it's at a certain percentage today, and that's going to remain or grow.
We actually. It's behind the investment in D&D and proving to them that that investment becomes a disproportionate part of their business. That's what grows the penetration. That's why D&D is such an important part of what we do. Just a question over here.
Yeah, hi, it's David Fabris from Macquarie. Just you know, you've given that guidance around the 6,000 net installs in 2024. I guess, you know, you've told us today about the strength of your portfolio, you've got really good performance, good customer relationships. You know, as we lean into 2025, should we be thinking about that kind of run rate, or does it kind of come off from that level?
I'm going to give that to Sally, David.
We don't give forward guidance, David. I mean, I think we put the 6,000 units out there as a point in time because of the performance in the first half, 3,002 units, which was the largest portion of the market, and we needed to set the market straight on what we thought we were capable of. Look, I would say, and I'll say this on Hector's behalf, there's growth in the business. So Hector will be under pressure to continue to deliver growth in the gaming ops, and I love that we've been up there today with both Hector and Moti saying how amazing their businesses are, because it just makes initiatives so much easier for me.
Got it, understood. And thinking about the comments you made about Europe and Latin America, is that something we should start keeping a scorecard on? Should we start to see an uptick in volumes? I mean, how long Like, is it a near-term opportunity, a medium-term opportunity, or just a thought at the moment?
It's a medium-term opportunity relative to the fact that you have to have content that resonates in that market. So it isn't just like—like I talked about a little bit of the Dragon Link example, we didn't take Dragon Link Australia version, launch it in North America. We didn't take the North America version and launch in Asia. You have to actually take the time to understand the markets. We visited 10 countries in Europe back in March. It's a very fragmented business. The UK is extremely different than, you know, France and the Netherlands, extremely different than Eastern Europe. So part of the strategy is, first and foremost, maximizing the share that we have in the markets we're already in, because there's still a lot of runway left there.
And then next, again, we're very methodical as we put runs on the board relative to that, are there new jurisdictions we want to enter? It's very similar to the North America experience, right? We first had to gain share, gain momentum, make sure we had the right content. And then as we grew confident there, we expanded the TAM, and we're continuing doing that in North America. So it'll follow a very same, same trajectory, David, but it's not like we have content we're going to launch there tomorrow, and you should start tracking it. But the content that we do have is resonating with parts of Europe.
Got it. Understood. Thank you.
Portfolio. Yes, it's the best performing portfolio. Trevor reminds me of that.
Hey, Paul Mason again. I just wanted to ask a question about the 6,000 install units guidance as well. Maybe if you could tell us a bit more about, like, your customer relationships in general around it. Sort of there's an implication of, like, forecastability beyond just having a hot game that means that you could provide guidance like that. And so I was just wanting to get some comments, if you can. I know it's commercial terms, so maybe you can't, but about like, you know, the nature of like larger, like master services agreements or things like that, that you might have with gaming ops customers that means that, like, just because NFL wasn't the best performing game in the history of the planet, you can still have really good certainty about delivering, like, an install-based growth number.
Yeah, I mean, the real trick in all of this, it's never about one game. The NFL was a genre to go after a new potential player base. One of the things that's unique about our business is we'll rarely talk to you about a specific game that is going to revolutionize anything, because really, the strength is behind the portfolio and how we invest behind that portfolio. What gave us confidence around the 6,000 is the visibility in the pipeline, the orders, the long-term deals, the good, better, best that you've heard me talk about several times.
That gave us the confidence to say, "Yes, we believe we can go get 6,000." And then I have the visibility into what are the new game launches that are happening as well in the second half. So not just the games that have currently launched, like Bank Busters, that's doing incredibly well, but it's also some of the content that's going to launch in the second half that gave us the confidence to go out there to talk about the 6,000 units.
So just like a quick follow-on on that. So just to clarify, some of the orders you get from customers, they're not explicitly an order for game X, game Y, game Z, they're actually generic orders for volume of units?
Ah, so the long-term deals that we have in place aren't game specific. But what is specific there is the commercial terms, and as you hit certain tiers, what are the benefits that you get during those tiers? Remember, I've talked about the good, better, best. We give them full visibility up front to say, "This is the deal. These are the options. You pick what's right for your current market state or your business. But we'll give you visibility going forward. If you hit this tier, you actually get access to whatever those commercial terms are." From a pipeline, from a funnel perspective, is how we call it internally. That's game specific. So the funnel is game specific. So we know what games Because we have to build them, right?
Which games are on order? In gaming ops, remember, we not only have to build them, we actually have to install them as well.
Thank you.
We can-
James, go to the next question.
We can go online. Am I on? Good. We don't have a lot of questions online, but, thanks, Andre. From UBS, he's put two on. One is about penetration of premium lease games on the floor. Hector, I think you've answered that already. The other one I'll put to you, Trevor. So the question is: What are you doing to reduce the risk of cultural friction as you centralize product management more? Examples, prioritization, budgets, incentives, IP sharing across the three silos.
Yeah, I think, let's put a bit of definition around that. We're centralizing the thinking, we're not centralizing the actions. So think global, act local, would be the way I would put that in context. So whilst Matt and Andy are working on the product and tech side, Superna Kalle, who's here, is our Chief Strategy and Content Distribution Officer, is around how do we think about our portfolio as a whole. So I actually believe that it's actually being business driven. So Hector, Moti, the Pixel team, they drive the demand of the content, and then we look at what's the best opportunity to maximize that content across our portfolio.
And what I would say to you, Andre, is that part of the attractiveness of this expanded distribution model for Aristocrat, for our creative teams, is to have a bigger portfolio to make games into more markets, more segments, more differentiation. And, and that's been seen as a positive from our perspective, to provide that incremental opportunity. So I don't think, while we talk about its, its thinking around that context, it's not centralizing that. At the end of the day, Hector has to deliver an annual performance number, has to drive growth. Moti will, and the other businesses will have to do that, and it's driven by that. And then we look at how do we become more efficient?
By using better technology, by thinking about which games we want in which markets, and which markets will we launch first, and then what's the right brand and right segment for new, emerging, and distribution points. So I just want to put a bit of clarity around that, if that's okay.
If I could just add, from a business perspective, we want that as well, because it creates further brand affinity. So it actually builds upon itself, right? So I want Buffalo to be in the interactive segment. I want it to be in Product Madness, because ultimately, that creates a bigger Buffalo player base, potentially, that when they walk on a casino floor, they know and recognize Buffalo. So it's actually quite aligned relative to what we all want. The other piece is we work really well together. That's the other piece I think that you didn't say, but it's obvious.
We've got no further questions online, so if there are any people on the webcast that want to ask a question, please go ahead. Otherwise, we'll go back to the room.
I think Matt has one, yeah.
Yeah, thank you. It's Matt Ryan again. Hector, so we've talked a lot about, I guess, new market entries. Over the last five or 10 years, you've gone into a lot of adjacencies with, you know, mixed success, ranging from, you know, VLT and Washington CDS and Bar Top and the like. You sort of talk about a lot of rigor and effort before you go in there, and we can see that, and you obviously put a lot of resources behind it. When you look back at the, I guess, different degrees of success that you've achieved in all of those, is there, I guess, a trend or a consistency in terms of what you got right and what you got wrong, in terms of those previous efforts?
Yeah. So definitely, as you stick closer to the core, the things that we're fundamentally good at, the probability of success is much higher. So you take Georgia COAM, for example. We're taking recognized brands, and we're bringing them into that market, and we're obviously building the skill element that's specific to that market. And like I said, the two studios based actually in Atlanta can actually go play every day and understand that. So the more you stick to the core, closest to the core, the things that we know we can do well, the probability of success higher. I'll give you the bar-top example, 'cause that's another extreme.
I still view Bar Top as a success, and you could argue financially from a P&L standpoint and a penetration standpoint, not as successful because we didn't get 30% share or 40% share. But the Bar Top example is a good example of the competitor that is the incumbent player in that field not having reinvested in refreshing that fleet. And as we entered that market, there's a bit of game theory that goes in this. They had to go move resources, 'cause we all have limited CapEx and limited resources, to go refresh that fleet. That investment that moved from one area to another allowed us to grow, potentially, maybe our gaming ops footprint faster because of that reallocation of reinvestment.
So sometimes you have the—we would love, and Trevor would love for every, from a PNL perspective, everything, you know, get to this high share, but there's an element of game theory that exists in the market as well, relative to these pockets of strength. Bar Top is a really hard market because players have played on that particular, you know, device and type of game for 20+ years. Very hard to displace that player preference. So the closest—the closer we stay to the core and the things that we're good at, the higher degree of success is what we've seen.
Thank you. I'm not sure whether we're allowed to go back to RMG, but I'm gonna try, because I think most people will be leaving today with $1 billion dollars in their heads. So, in one of your footnotes, you talk about the contribution ex NPI of about $ 900 million, and you're going for a billion, which would obviously imply that NPI could be about $ 100 million. It's actually annualizing about $74 million at the moment, per your disclosure, which would assume a pretty massive slowdown in its current growth rate over the next 5 years. I know that's only one very small component, but I guess it leads to the question of how you've approached the billion dollars over the next 5 years and how much buffer or conservatism might be in that.
I know you don't give a whole lot of targets. You've sort of usually met them in the past. I'm just interested in whether you can address that and maybe the scenarios that get you to a bigger number or a smaller number. What do you see the big sort of moving parts within that?
Yeah, sure. I'll have a, I'll have a go, Matt. First of all, just to put it out there, we said at least $1 billion. So just I wanna be clear. So if you look at what we've got with the interactive business to start, first of all, we've got a scaled iGaming, sorry, iLottery business. So we've already got a scaled iLottery business that is well-performing and, and still got opportunity ahead of it. So that's the first part. Second part, CX business, again, a scaled business that has got a strong footprint already, and that makes up a, a large percentage of the base. You then say, where can we go to get growth from there? We've spoke earlier about getting a better share of the markets in which we already participate in, so the three markets in North America.
We're just talking North America at that point. Then we get a larger share of the existing-- of the other four markets that haven't opened yet. So there's another step up again. So share in the first three, and then a greater share in those, plus the share in the four that open after that. Then think about how do we enter Europe sorry, how do we leverage the Pariplay network into EMEA by putting Aristocrat content into Pariplay? And that's just, that's been started, but we've got a lot more. I think we might have used the context of putting water into the pipe, and that's about how do we get more content into Pariplay to get into the European markets for bigger distribution into the European iGaming market from that perspective.
Then you start to think about the use of the partnerships with our gaming customers for the PAM, and where do we start to get PAM penetration and opportunities from that perspective. So there, if you like, the stepping stones that get you to what we believe is the number. When it comes to the NPI piece, I think you can assume that we're now starting to win more contracts without Pollard. And so whilst there's a good relationship there, there is an opportunity to enter more markets on our own.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to say. There's no slowdown at all. It's just that, as you see, as we mentioned, we have a great relationship. We are working very hard to grow all of our customers' businesses. As you saw, our NPI customers are growing. However, when they get to finish their terms, we would compete for their future business by ourself, and we won New Hampshire. Michigan is out for a bid now, as we speak. We will see the other contracts of NPI coming to, to their terms in the next, you know, five years or whatever, in different timelines. And that's why you should not look at that as a slowdown.
It's just a transitioning of business to, to win by ourselves, and of course, new business that will be open up in the market, which will become, from, from our direct relationship with, with customers.
Okay. Rohan, have you got one?
Hi, Rohan from MST. Question for Hector. You talked about striking the balance between core and premium earlier. How are your customers helping guide you to that, and is there any common feedback you're getting from them on that front?
Yeah, I mean, I think customers look at their overall spend with us, and they expect a return on that investment. I think one of the ways they do look at it, though, that's very data-driven, is they'll look at share of the floor and share of the GGR. And there's some public metrics that you can look out there from third-party surveys. There's still runway relative to that. So if you look at premium gaming offerings, which I know gets asked, what is the ceiling of that share?
You look at the share of the install base and the percentage of GGR that it's getting on a casino floor, and we're still, whether you call it entitlement share or what—fair share, however you want to term it, we're, there's still growth there. And it's the same thing with core. The percentage of physical slot machines installed relative to the performance of those slot machines, we're still under that number, which is a good place to be. But operators do expect the fact that we create great content in both swim lanes, and, and that's the healthy friction that exists. And you have to get that right because
And you'll find that Whisker Wheels is doing 3.3 times house average because or Bao Zhu was doing over 3 times house average because customers are seeing the fact that you're creating that fine balance between what's recurring revenue and what's core. But it's a friction point, and we have really strong mechanisms to be able to create the right decisions across that friction point.
Thank you.
Thanks, Trevor.
Okay, well, that brings us to the end of the session today. So first of all, I wanna thank you for your participation and your questions through this session, and hopefully, you've found it to be useful and informative on Aristocrat and the transition that we are going through. I just wanted to last leave a couple of quick clear messages with you. You know, we're, we're a technology-driven content distribution company with global presence and scale. We've given you sizes of markets, we've given you where our scale sits, but there is still lots of opportunity from our market point of view.
We continue to strengthen our long-term prospects and resilience in markets at different stages of growth and maturity, and you can see that across both all of our different business units themselves and also the growth opportunities, whether it's geographical, adjacency or product. We're also focused on growing market share. Hopefully, you heard that through every one of the presenters today around taking share as core to what we invest for every day, and that's our key priority to get us to grow on an ongoing basis. So we continue to focus on that.
We've also got a highly capable and experienced management team, and as you know, Hector mentioned in the Q&A there, that work tirelessly together on the objectives of how do we grow Aristocrat as a group, and how do we use the strengths of our individual teams' capabilities to leverage that? And I do believe that there's a lot more opportunity in that for us as an organization, as we continue to evolve and become a greater organization going forward, and we drive stronger shareholder value. So with that, I would just like to say to you that I'm more excited today about our prospects into the future than I've been for many years, with the acquisition of Neo, the strength of our management team, the content and product portfolio behind us, and I just want to thank shareholders for your time today.
Hopefully, you found this useful, and obviously, James and Marla are here if you've got any further questions. But thank you for your time, and we look forward to talking to you again at our next update. Thank you.