Good morning and welcome to Aristocrat's Management Roundtable for March 22nd. My name is Rohan Gallagher, I'm the General Manager for Investor Relations. Welcome. Of course we'd love to see as many of you live in person but over the last couple of years it's been quite challenging. We also recognize the value of corporate access and with the global business we've got many people around the world and to bring them together to share in the continued ongoing business updates for the Company. Hopefully this is a nice way in which we can manage that. We'll also be reporting our 31 March half year end results in May.
For further updates in terms of we're very fortunate today we've got three members of our executive steering committee here at Aristocrat. We have Mr. Trevor Croker, our CEO and Managing Director. Good morning Trevor. We have Mr. Mike Lang, the Head of our Pixel United's business based in London. Good evening to you Mike. I am very proud to have my friend and the new CEO of Aristocrat Gaming Business, Mr. Hector Fernandez. Good morning Hector, welcome.
Thank you.
What we're going to do. Thank you very much to those people who have registered and particularly those people who have provided questions in advance for today's meeting. What we're going to do is use those key questions as a sort of infrastructure or the basis for today's call and then we'll supplement that with any live questions that you may have throughout this call. First, what I'd like to do is just introduce Trevor to just give a quick update on how the business is performing. Trevor, good morning.
Thanks Rohan. Thanks to all those on the line for the continued interest in Aristocrat. Let's make a couple of opening comments before handing it over to the people who you really want to hear from, which is Mike and Hector. The business continues to keep its strong momentum that we took over 2021. The fundamentals that drove our performance in 2021, great game performance, great execution into new markets and adjacent markets, and also in our gaming, sorry, in our digital and our various businesses, continue to be strong hallmarks of Aristocrat's success. Recent industry surveys, you will have noticed, have had top performing cabinets, games, and number one and number two positions for Social Casino or S quad RPG games in our portfolio. So portfolio strength of Aristocrat remains strong as we advise at the AGM.
We remain committed to our outlook and will continue to work with our customers and with our players through these difficult times to ensure that we have good solutions for them and we continue to invest strongly behind the ongoing growth of Aristocrat as a whole. I remain extremely confident about where our business is placed, the momentum we're carrying and the structure of the fundamentals of the organization. Great product performance, great verticals in the diversification of the digital business now being a strong part of our growth engine, and the strong cash fundamentals which lead us to a very strong balance sheet as well. With that, I'll hand it back to Rohan. We have released an announcement this morning on our position on the Ukraine and Russia.
Mike will talk a little bit more to the detail than that when we talk about Pixel United, but with that, I'll hand it back to you, Rohan.
Thanks, Trevor. Ladies and gentlemen, 2022 was supposed to be a good year after 2020 and 2021 haven't started out so well. Floods here locally in Australia and unfortunately the tragic circumstances over in Europe and obviously with a global business that has implications for the likes of Aristocrat. Turning our attention to Europe and in particular to Pixel United's business, it's been the source of many questions and with that what I'd like to do is just open up to Mike just to sort of step the team into our broader exposure into Pixel United's exposure into the Ukraine/ Russian region, please. Thanks, Mike.
Great, sure. Why don't I focus on Ukraine and the significant efforts we've had in regards to our employees there in terms of getting them into safety and to get our business into the situation. First and foremost, our business is focused on two areas. One is people first reporting in progress and then secondly, ongoing business continuity of the business itself. Phase 1 of our efforts started many, many weeks before the invasion of Ukraine started, where number one, we highly encouraged people to get to safety zones within the country or to leave the country because we did see what was coming. Number two was building a significant amount of content and live ops inventory that we would use on an ongoing basis that would protect us no matter what would happen. When the invasion happened, we really had to kick it into high gear.
Our main area has been most recently to evacuate as many people as we could to safety in Poland or again into regions of the country that are safer at this moment to the rest, to the West. We have created a Crisis Management Team that has literally been working 24/7 across the organization, supporting staff across Ukraine with payments of advanced payments, debit cards, supplies, and direct aid for all those people that are in Ukraine. Currently, there are two buses daily that are leaving from an undisclosed location that I would rather not speak of right now for their safety within the Ukraine area that is taking people to Poland. Those buses are filled every day with our employees, family members, relatives, grandparents, and even pets as we try to evacuate those people out of the country at the porting crossing.
We believe providing direct support as they arrive, getting them accommodations throughout Poland. Very live and be safe. We're also providing relocation payments, ability for them to get visas, insurance and counseling. There's also been telephone hotlines 24/7 run by the organization in order to be able to gain contact with these employees.
I think we may have just lost connection with Mike at the moment. He's going to be dialing back in. He's out at the moment from an audio perspective. We will come back to Mike. Whilst we're looking at addressing Mike's audio, let's go to our friend Hector Fernandez. I'm very proud to introduce Hector. Hector and I have come through the Finance Leadership Team together and it's Hector succeeds Mitchell Bowen who moves across, who will be running our Real Money Gaming efforts going forward. Hector, first of all, welcome and unfortunately many people haven't been able to get to Vegas to meet you personally and so on. If I can indulge for a moment, could I trouble you just to talk a little bit about your background and how you got to Aristocrat?
Sure. I'll start a little bit. I'll give you a little bit of biography of where I'm from. I'm actually Guatemalan. I was born in Guatemala. My parents immigrated to the United States when I was about a year old. I didn't learn English until I was six, so Spanish is my first language. I'm still proud to be bilingual. One of the things I love about that history and background when I think about our Company is we have such strong Australian roots, just like I have very strong Guatemalan roots.
While I'm a naturalized U.S. citizen, I speak the language, I still eat the food. I think it's really important as we evolve our business not to ever forget our roots or where we came from. I went to college in the U.S. I worked at Deloitte out of undergrad. After business school, I worked at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati in a global role. I worked at Amgen at a large biotech also in California. Prior to coming to Aristocrat, I worked at Western Digital where we made hard drives and flash storage devices.
I joined Aristocrat in November 2018 as the CFO of the Americas. I was very fortunate to learn the business very quickly. When you're the finance person, you get access to a lot of information, a lot of numbers. I was part of building the strategy for growth from Connect and Unleash. For the last a little bit over two and a half years, I've been the President of the Americas. U.S., Canada, Latin America, and as of a year ago, EMEA as well. I'm incredibly excited to take the torch f rom Mitch. Mitchell has done a phenomenal j ob of setting the foundation for our ability to grow and our strategy does not change whatsoever. Our strategy is how do we continue to build on the strengths and foundation to grow the business at even faster rates.
Yeah, fantastic. We've got Mike back and we're back live. That's the beauty of live recording. We'll stick with Hector and we'll revert back to my good friend in London, Hector. The jewel in the crown is clearly our gaming operations business and it's really commercializing the world's best games from an outstanding, unwavering commitments to D&D. Can you just give us a snapshot in terms of the lie of the land in the U.S. markets, in particular the Gaming Ops segment at the moment?
Sure. I think, you know, through the COVID period, one of the things that we managed to see was the choice not to cut any investment in D&D. As all of you know, we continued our strong investment in D&D. The other thing that we did during COVID is we launched Aristocrat Assist. We went and listened to our customers, understood what their needs in the market were, and we launched a program to help them get back up and running. One of the things that you have seen as a result of some of those actions is that our business is stronger than ever. From a Gaming Ops perspective, we continue to win a lot of different awards. One of the things I was very proud of, I was recently at.
The Eilers Awards Ceremony and we won the Most Improved Premium Supplier for the third year in a row, which is a great accomplishment when you think about the fact that we're already the number one premium gaming supplier. We also won supplier of the year at the Eilers Award, which again is an industry event. It is all of the peers and customers nominating who win some of these awards. From a Gaming Ops perspective, given the investments we've made in D&D, given the portfolio that we have, given the cabinet mix, if you've seen some of the recent Eilers Report, where we continue to perform incredibly well, we're very, very excited about the business. The other thing I would tell you we're owing to is we've really transformed this business from a transactional, hey, what do we need to do from a quarterly perspective, half perspective.
We really built a strategic partnership with our customers which has enabled us to sustain some of these shocks in the economy and pandemics and all of those things. We continue to really believe there's strong momentum in the business and we continue to see it every day.
Yeah, thanks. That customer centricity is a key cultural attribute here at Aristocrat and we'll unpack that further with Gaming Ops. You know, you've seen, you know, a shout out to Todd Eilers is on the call and Eilers, their surveys are suggesting we continue to take share in addition to just the install base. Your Fee Per Day is superior to the industry. From a wallet share, I suppose you could phrase it, the share's even higher. Do you find that, is there a natural limit, is there a ceiling to that market share on the way forward?
Yeah, actually we talk a lot about. This, and we actually don't believe there's. A ceiling because we built these strategic partnerships. Whereas before I think people would say, okay, what's the natural share that I don't want to go beyond? I think our customers today, because we're so close to them, because we interact with them so much, they're really looking at return on investment and value. When you look at that metric, I really don't think that there is a natural ceiling to our Gaming Operations business. If you look at the top performing games, per the Eilers R eport, we're 18 and 19 of the top 25 in premium. We are top 5 of the 7 cabinets. From a performance standpoint, we really don't see a ceiling as long as we continue to put out great content and invest behind D&D.
Okay, thanks. Thanks Hector. Rhett Kessler from Pengana and Matt Ryan from Barrenjoey have been asking around the general player activity you are seeing. You know GGR was exceptional as the markets reopened and it is sort of trending back and moderating back towards those pre- COVID 2019 levels. For somebody on the ground, how are you seeing the general market and the outlook particularly and we will touch on it next is around inflationary pressures.
Sure. GGR continues to have really strong momentum. I think there was a couple of states a couple of days ago that released some of the GGR numbers and very healthy growth rates even year over year. Even as we get to a difficult compare, period. The other phenomenon we've seen, particularly the U.S., is that our player base tends to has really skewed a little bit on the younger side, about five years younger than our average pre- COVID, if you will. The good news about that is that their base remains going to casinos. I think they discovered what a casino can offer, obviously the amenities, the entertainment aspect of it, and they continue to go to a casino every single day.
The other phenomenon we've seen is some. Of the older population, 65 and over. That have been very careful because of COVID. Some of those have not come back quite yet, which actually tells you how impressive GGR actually is, because our core consumer or core player, some of them, are still sitting out on the sideline and coin in is incredibly strong. As the pandemic, as we slowly progress to potentially putting that behind us and it becoming an endemic, we are very confident that those players will come back and carry the momentum forward.
In light of that, you've got that on the positive in terms of margin of safety, but on the negative, seeing energy prices going up. In Australia here we're seeing AUD 2 a litre on fuel, in the U.S. we're seeing over $4 a gallon. This is for the foreign, many of us. Will that have an impact as we turn our attention into the second half of our financial year and then into 2023?
Yeah, we remain very cautious. Obviously inflation can have a tampering impact. On our business as consumers, players look at their overall spend, overall wallet, if you will, and then make decisions on how they allocate that. We remain cautiously optimistic relative to some of those inflationary pressures. I will tell you though, in the month of January, February, we have not actually seen a significant slowdown. Clearly inflation is starting to catch up, oil prices are starting to rise and we will continue to keep a close eye on that every single day and ensure that the fundamentals of the business do not really change. We continue to invest in the best cabinets, the best content. Even as inflation puts pressure, potential pressure on the business, we feel very confident that we will still be the product of choice and the partner of choice.
Yeah, it's great. You've got the margins to start with in regards to that, of course, of course we're currently in value. If we turn our attention now to the customers, and customers are very important aspects of the Aristocrat business, what are their capital expenditure intentions? How are they, are they sort of now starting to step up and reinvest? Economy happens in the U.S. How are you seeing it?
Sure. One of the phenomenons we actually saw through COVID was the willingness to shift to participation or rev share. Obviously from our fiscal year results you saw that in the strong numbers that we were able to deliver. I think a lot of operators specifically in the U.S. got more comfortable with this concept of hey, like the sharing of revenue because now the interest and the risks are aligned between a supplier or like you'd like to say a partner, strategic partner of choice. That was a really interesting phenomenon that we continue to see. The other thing we are starting to see, capital budgets have more clarity or visibility. About, you know, nine, 10 months ago, some customers would tell us that they would get their capital allocation on a quarterly basis where normally they would get it on a yearly basis.
We're starting to hear now that customers are starting to go back to getting yearly capital allocations and feeling comfortable with investments. The other thing, quite frankly, that's driven some of that is as GGR has been elevated, as players come into a casino, they're demanding the latest and greatest product. That is driving some of the underlying demand and capital allocation that our customers are doing. For us, as we've invested in the product portfolio, a disproportionate part of that capital now comes to our business.
If we talk, this is actually a great segue because David Fabris from Macquarie was asking about the key titles and franchises, how are they performing? Are there any sort of games to call out which we could actually go for about 20 minutes just on that question alone, given our portfolio. From your perspective, where are the key highlights and market trends going forward?
Yeah, I mean it's a tough question. I almost have to have my notes, I have to try to read all of the top performing games. Obviously we've had tremendous success with Buffalo Link in the U.S. as we rolled out that product. Just to remind everyone, that's a combination of Buffalo math and Lightning Link, it was the fastest scaling product we had ever launched at the Company, doing very.
Very well in the market and we continue to be very excited about that product. Dragon Link, if you look at some of the Eilers performance numbers, is actually in a post COVID or during COVID world doing four to five times house average, which is unheard of, kind of over the long history of this industry. You know, Cash Express Luxury Line continues to do incredibly well in the U.S. We launched a new game, Dune, which timed exactly with the theoretical, the release of the movie in the theatres which was also industry first and I could go on and on forever on all these amazing games and content that we have. It's our dedication to investment that has really driven this business.
Yeah. The cabinets have really made an impact . Trevor?
I'll just again talk about the for-sale portfolio , which were digital- first games but now land- based, and they're successful games as well.
Yeah. If you look at from a core portfolio and again referencing the Eilers Report, we are 9, 10, 9 or 10 of the top 25. Now as Trevor mentioned, he had the strategy of releasing some games digitally and then getting player feedback, real time feedback and we got that feedback. Cashman Bingo is a good example of that. We made changes to the game and then we launched into the land based environment and what we have seen is. Those games that you competed digitally first.
Then learned and made changes. They've actually been number one or number two in the Eilers Report and that's really exciting to see. As we talked about capital allocation, we're now a huge participant now in that for sale capital allocation because of some of those investments.
Of course our focus is on our customers, but we do get a lot of interest off of the public listed competitors. Can you just touch on the competitive landscape? Some of the guys have gone through a lot of change. They've had to change their business model, some have even changed their name. How are you seeing the competitive landscape in the U.S., which is usually generally very competitive anyway?
Yeah, very competitive market obviously. I keep coming back to the core decisions that we made around D&D investment, around Aristocrat Assist, about being a strategic partner of choice for the long term. While we do keep a close eye on our competitors and remain very humble and a bit paranoid, making sure that we do not actually pass this at any point in time, much more focused on our customer and their needs. We spend quite a bit, I personally spend quite a bit of time traveling to see our customers and listening directly from them and trying to understand the things that their business needs. The other thing I will tell you too through COVID is we have actually interacted a lot more with C-level executives of our customers.
Actually listening to the CEO, the CFO, the COO to truly understand what are some of those business measures that they're looking for. Through those relationships we've been able to offer solutions in a long term setting to drive value for both of us. We feel very confident that as we evolve those relationships. W e keep a close eye on our competitors, but we don't spend too much time worrying about them.
An observation I've seen in the last three to four years has been Aristocrat's moved from a transaction style selling boxes to a partnership supplier of choice. How do you see it coming into the business and is that trend something that's sustainable?
Yeah. We actually learned a lot through our Oklahoma business that tends to have longer term deals. We took that model across the U.S. and actually outside of the U.S. as well to understand what are the value needs that a customer needs. Then putting together a deal, an offer, a contract, that is a win win. I think a lot of times in. Business, some people think Teddy has to. Be a win lose. Someone wins and someone loses. One of the things we've learned and have been very successful at is creating these win win situations with our customers. It is less about, hey, we need to hit a quarterly number, we need to hit a half number. It is more about how do we build your business for the long term. That also protects and builds our business.
The other thing I will tell you is our commitment to 11%-12% of D&D spend of revenue. That creates a further moat around our business because as we get bigger, absolute dollar investments that go into D&D grow as well, which then kind of continues the cycle and protects the business. Business in the long term.
Okay, I know you're getting. It's great to have you here in Australia. I know you're learning the Australian business. There's the many volunteers that are taking to the pubs and clubs. Tough job. Somebody's got to do it. We look forward to catching up with you in May. Thanks for that. Welcome to the team. Now let's turn back to London and our friend Mike. I believe we've kicked our audio issues. Mike, you were talking about Ukraine and given the importance of Ukraine, could you just probably take a step back and just go through our position in Ukraine at this particular point?
As I was saying, and I apologize about the phone connection, we've been doing a lot to try to protect our employees and get them to a safe location. Through all the efforts that I am describing now, two thirds of our employee base within the Ukraine are either in safer locations within the Ukraine or out of the country, either in Poland or other markets. That in itself is kind of two monumental efforts to do that. Two things though to keep in mind. Number one, there's still a third of people that have decided not to leave their particular markets or aren't able to leave because of what you're all seeing on the news. They're all in our thoughts and prayers, those people. We're going to consistently continue to work hard to make sure they are able to get locations and leave the country eventually.
Appropriately. Number two is that we're building to the future permanent relocation for those examples. As we mentioned, we've opened a new facility in Poland in Bielsko-Biała, which is a great location west of Cracow, excuse me. We believe that is a very strong technology hub that not only the people from Ukraine are excited about coming to, there will also be another recruiting location for us to continue to bring this back. Signing to build up another location in Poland as well. The reason in Poland is that we think it's better because it'll be much easier for the people of Ukraine to get there, to immigrate there, as well as closer to people in Ukraine that do not leave.
Number two is, you know, we were talking about COVID earlier, our organization has been working remotely for the last two and a half years. The idea now that we have a dispersed organization across Ukraine and Poland and other parts of the world working on the product, it's been fairly seamless for us. We've been incredibly surprised. If you look at the results of what we've seen so far, it's been stable with no impact as of yet. We're clearly looking at what will happen in the future and we're monitoring it. Number two is we've invested so much in content that is inventoried in many ways.
I think we may have lost him again. Obviously, it's challenging times and who wants to be in the media with all this live television and so on? I'll go to Trevor because I know Trevor's been close to Mike and working through it and hopefully we can get Mike back on the call. Let's turn our attention. You know, Mike was talking about Ukraine. Trevor, let's talk about Russia. Peta Arnott from Touchstone, Paul Ainsworth, Rohan Sundram from Marquee are looking at our Russian operations and in particular we have a studio in Krasnodar. Can you just help us have in terms of our position there and the way forward?
Yes. While Mike's reconnecting, I'll.
I'm back on, Trevor. I'm sorry, I don't understand this. I'll try one more time.
My opening comments would be. Comments would be my piece that our team on the ground is tirelessly to focus on our people and to make sure that we looked after that. There is structure behind it and the fact that we are putting people first. I am very proud of the efforts they have put in and the fact that that is what we do at Aristocrat. The way we address things is people first, we look at customer centricity in and we look at business resilience and each one of those boxes being addressed on a daily basis by our team and they are working extremely hard. Mike and the crew in that part of the world have done an exceptional job and very proud of what our teams are doing. This is a long way to go, but very proud of it. Mike.
I appreciate that Trevor.
We were just talking about Russia and is obviously inquiry in terms of we have a studio in Russia. Can you touch on that please?
Yes. As we've announced, we are suspending operations of our games in Russia, and the reason is very clear. It's just not viable for us to operate games business there not only because of the sanctions but because of the broader support for our employees in Ukraine. There's displaced and impacted by this currency. As a result we are suspending those operations. However, we do have a studio there of which we are very much reviewing our options as to what will be next to there to support our employees there who have no fault with their loan if they're put into this position. Given the sanctions, which we all know are changing, we're going to do everything we can to employees and give them an opportunity if we can. We also have to make the decision to suspend our operations from a game standpoint there.
Realistically, how the future will evolve there I'm not sure. It's clear to us that likely we'll be able to optimize long term in Russia, given the current situations. That being said, as we said in our announcement, it's not a material part of our business. It represents only 3% of our total revenue. We also have the ability to shift resources across our global portfolio that we have and a global organization that we have. That effort is underway and we feel very confident we'll be able to do that. This is one of the reasons, you know, we were talking earlier, Hector, was about the importance of scale. This is why scale matters in our business. Right. We have the scale and the diversity.
From a geography standpoint, to be able to tap in and be able to solve situations like this, bottom line is the right thing to do. We just as an organization are taking that step forward in order to do that. That is our position on Russia .
From an ESG perspective, or those analysts who look at it from an ESG. I'd encourage you to have a look at the people first culture in action here at Aristocrat. We've got employees, volunteers on telephone hotlines reaching out to their colleagues. The commitment, the effort, the support has just been phenomenal. To the credit of the Playsoft team in Poland, to Plarium, to Mike and the team, it's just been an outstanding effort and it's going to probably go on for a lot longer, unfortunately. I'd also like to acknowledge and recognise the investment community. There's been a number of people who have proactively reached out to put their spreadsheets aside, albeit temporarily, but to reach out from a humanity perspective. It's been very appreciated. Thank you to all of those individuals. Let's turn to the business.
Business is continuing to do outstandingly under really tough conditions. We've had a number. Social Casino represents half of Pixel United's bookings, led by apps like Lightning Link, Cashman Casino and the like. Mike, Matt Ryan from Barrenjoey is asking, how are you seeing customers responding to the user acquisition, particularly in Social Casino after a strong, really strong couple of years?
Yes, again, I think our Social Casino business continues to be running on all cylinders. Right. We have found, Matt, that our new marketing strategies that we've developed over the last year and a half are really starting to bear fruit. We have a much more effective and targeted direct performance that we're seeing great returns on. We have also tested things like television advertising in the U.S. that has been very successful. We think that the strategy that we're in is strong. I think one of the reasons why is also the great brands of content we have at Aristocrat. It's easier to market things when you have a great product. One of the things that we should not underestimate is the competitive advantage that we have in our content.
Again, Trevor and Hector mentioned it, that not only the land and the digital, but digital now, first content that's being developed, that is going the other direction. I think that puts us in a very strong position as we go forward in that business. Led by Yoav Ecker from Product Madness, has been a tremendous hire for us and really done a great job building that business that we've seen so far. For the decades that we're seeing, if anything.
We launched into a new genre with Mech Arena recently and the action genre, Justin Barratt from CLSA and David Fabris from Macquarie. Just wanting to sort of have a look at the performance and the learnings to date.
The performance has been pretty close. Remember when we talked before, we're still learning a lot in this segment. It's a new segment for us, the action segment. One of the things that we really have realized is that we have to continually build more and more content for that game. It's fairly early days in that effort. I know that with the success of RAID, that was an overnight sensation. It really wasn't. There was a lot of investment content over time and this is an entirely new segment that we're learning. The other thing is the marketing piece of this. We're learning a lot because it's a broader demographic for Mech Arena than the targeted in the role playing games. It's a different marketing mix that we're doing as a result as well.
The results continue to be very encouraging and we're continuing to monitor the KPIs to see when we can go to that next level. There's nothing that we're seeing right now, Rohan, that would say it's not going to hit the kind of comps that we talk about. Over $100 million game eventually on that kind of run rate. We believe that's possible and achievable.
Mike, Mech Arena moves us into a new genre, the action genre, within that core space of strategy RPG and action. Not only does it lift the addressable market opportunities for us, but it does provide that diversification. Can you comment on the other mid-core exposure games like you mentioned, RAID and Vikings and others?
Yeah, in the mid-core space we also have a new game that's being launched, Magic Wars, which is part of our pipeline. Again, it's more of a strategy-like game. We have great experience with the Viking franchise and the early results of the KPIs seem really encouraging to us in terms of what we'll see. We think that strategy RPG market has a lot more growth to be able to develop. We're looking at a whole bunch of different areas that we can continue to invest in and more pipeline in that area. Very bullish on that segment and believe it will continue to grow for us.
Okay, fantastic. A related question which you touched on already with Magic Wars, also just in relation to Russia, Ukraine, Steven Green from REST and a few others have asked about the game pipeline and are there any potential impacts to that game pipeline generally and are there any associated updates you can provide us at this point in time.
As of today, the answer is no impact to our pipeline. Here's Magic Wars. The team is working feverishly on it and the results look good, but it's very, very early. As you know, the other team that is being launched is outside of that region is in Finland. From our acquisition of Future play we're going to be launching Merge Gardens, which is the first game that we developed in that acquisition. Very encouraging KPIs and again a team that we've really integrated well with our Plarium team in Tel Aviv in terms of bringing kind of capabilities on both sides of learning to take that genre to what we think to be a very much higher level.
The third game is Slotsberg, which is a code name, which is our next state of the art Social Casino game, which is bringing cutting edge graphics and features that have never been seen before with all digital first content, first time as a launch. Not only is that exciting from our perspective, it's a very unique positioning. It's not cannibalizing our existing franchises along the way, it's creating incremental growth as part of that. We are really excited about that game as well. So take Mech Arena , I believe in this kind of scaling and those other games, that's a pretty good pipeline. As I'll say to you, not all of them are going to be successful. Right. We hear from Matt, we'll be talking about and we're not going to bet 1000, but that's part of the business.
I think the way we're managing it is managing very carefully our investment, not only in the product but on marketing until we know we have the ability to invest at reasonable investment levels. That kind of more disciplined approach has done us well over the last three years and we're going to continue.
Fantastic. Finally a question for you. Mike is around Apple introduced the identification for advertisers or IDFA and has had an impact on the industry in terms of targeted advertising. We're several months into that now. Can you just give a comment in terms of how IDFA has impacted the user acquisition strategy and in particular the genres which have been more exposed than others.
Right. Interesting enough, our hypothesis of what the impact of IDFA has done has been completely the opposite as usual. We had thought at the time that our Social Casino and our strategy role playing games would be the most exposed in that environment. What has happened is it has not been the case. Those have done very, very well. Frankly, the biggest reason is that those platforms have the least dependence on Facebook. This was really the key marketing channel that has been most impacted by IDFA. Anyone who does not can see that when you go listen to Facebook and they start talking about other things like Meta, how-to pages, because they are a platform, it is just not as effective from a direct performance standpoint as it otherwise was. Because Social Casino and strategy RPG have diversified so much. We talked about it before.
You've been influencers, search ad networks and the television, they've been able to kind of weather that storm. The Casual segment in which the demographic of primarily 45 and older females highly dependent on Facebook channel, that's the one that for the entire industry, not just us, has been most impacted. We have aggressively the one casual business, that one casual game, excuse me, that we are spending significant UA on EverMerge because we don't really spend a lot on the others that are kind of franchise legacy games. We've taken on an incredible diversified new look at our marketing channels, leveraging ad networks, we're looking at other kinds of influencer based activities and we're seeing a good reasonable return now because of those decisions that you made that we've made over the last six months.
Long term, that is the challenge of the industry, I would say from a consumer standpoint where you're trying to target older demographics, how is it, what are going to be those direct marketing channels that Facebook is just not as effective as it wants?
Thanks Mike. It's a global borderless industry, digital, and we've got great diversification and that scale has really helped us in regards to business class continuity, planning and so on. Thank you Mike and all the very best to your team, particularly those in Europe at the moment. Let's pivot across to Trevor and let's talk about the strategy. We have received a number of questions around Real Money Gaming and following the Playtech transaction process, we did provide an update in regards to the AGM. Can you just summarise, you know, the process since the proposed Playtech acquisition and where we're at at the moment.
Thanks, Rohan. Excuse me. Our commitment to enter RMG is unwavering. We were excited about it a couple years ago. We did the work to look at a way to enter at scale and quickly. At the same time we were building capability within the organization. We have RMG capabilities, has been built over the last 12 months and is now scalable within the core organization. Our commitment to enter RMG remains. We see that the proposition that we bring to entering RMG is great content, great customer relationships, and a strong regulatory position and ability to work within regulated markets. That's the competitive advantage we bring to the business. Also strong tech foundation.
Whilst there are options to build and buy, which is our strategy, we have already been building for a period of time and we will give you an update when we come back to May as some of the milestones and the progress that we're making along that journey. We haven't been sitting here waiting for a process to end and a transaction to be completed. We've been focused on making sure we execute our strategy and we continue to do that with, as I said, internal investment which has already been in place and potentially the opportunity to buy certain technical or other aspects that are required to accelerate our entry into the RMG market, which we feel confident on the basis, as I said, strong content. We've heard from our customers what they expect and need from this sort of saying.
That's what Hector is hearing and talking about in the gaming business. We know our regulatory strength and ability to be a regulatory partner in this segment.
Okay, we've got a clear strategy. The strategy's on time. The methodology is going to pivot from entering with the Playtech acquisition to a build and buy strategy going forward. We will provide the market with regular updates throughout. Most notably, the next update will be May featuring Mitchell Bowen. Here's an interesting question for Trevor. Sitting next to two finance-based people, let's turn to capital management. You know one of the issues with acquiring a business in the U.K. is to have financial certainty. We did raise equity in conjunction with that proposed Playtech acquisition combined with some significant free cash flow that's generated from the business organically. We arguably have one of the best, if not the best, balance sheets in the gaming industry.
There has been a number of questions in terms of capital allocation priorities subsequent post Playtech proposed transaction. What are your general comments about that we've had at this point in time, Trevor?
Yeah, thanks Rohan. I think thanks to Peta and Larry that asked the questions as well. We're still a strong growth Company and I'm unwavering on that commitment. I can still see growth in Hector's business, I can see growth in Mike's business and I can see growth in RMG and we'll continue to see invest behind that. A sustained diversified global growth business with strong free cash flow is a great place to be. We now deploy and continue to deploy our capital priorities the way that we have in the past, which has been a proven success factor. Investing in D&D, investing in Gaming Ops CapEx and investing in UA to drive digital. That still remains our priority and we're continuing to focus on funding that for the business as a whole.
Obviously we see M&A as a way to accelerate growth. Historically, Aristocrat has driven growth by taking share, entering adjacencies and then growing, and then using M&A to accelerate our growth. That still remains our priority from a capital perspective. After those key priorities of investing in our business for long term growth, there are other options like buybacks, dividends, paying down debt, and all of those that are actively being discussed. I think at this point in time we continue to invest for the long term. I think what we're seeing in the market at the moment on the way that prices are going for opportunities are generally coming off opportunity.
Time to have opportune, time to have a strong balance sheet, have strong growth fundamentals in the core business and have the capacity to be opportunistic for the right strategic options. Always keeping shareholders' interest at the heart of what we're trying to achieve.
The trends around share gains in Gaming Ops, Game Sales, Pixel United, and generation of good cash flow, strong balance sheet. There are some pretty luxurious problems that the Company's facing in terms of the future and the way forward and it's really just prioritizing those. Is that a fair summary?
A better summary than I do.
Okay. As we draw to a close though, and I just asked Trevor, do you have any sort of final comments or remarks before we close this meeting today?
No, just to say thank you. As I said, I recognise the incremental efforts that the team has been putting in over the last period of time and we're all very proud of that. I think with the people on the line today, the fundamentals of this business are very strong and continue to be strong and we're confident about the delivery of those fundamentals. That provides us optionality, which we talked about a number of times during this call as well. I think the piece that perhaps we haven't talked a lot about is the depth of talent from Aristocrat.
When you can look at the strength of our leadership teams, the changes that we're able to make, the talent we're actually acquiring and the growth that's coming through inside of the organization as a whole when you think about the growth that we're actually doing with adding new talent pools, new genres, new capabilities, but also being able to have the flexibility to make recent management changes and having the depth in the organization to be able to do that with high quality, proven talent that exist in the industry. From my perspective, we've got a very strong talent pool on top of, like I said, the business fundamentals risk in great shape. I've said it many times before, the next 10 years, we're risk quite a bit in the last 10 years and that hasn't changed in my mind at all.
There's bumps in the road but we are well positioned that whatever the size of the market is, we will pay to this year and more and continue to take our share in more of those markets, regardless of the size. We'll continue to invest the growth. That's what's been able to drive the. Diversification of our business over time and also sustained market share gains that we continue to get.
It's an exciting pitch. Thanks Trevor. Conscious of time. I'll draw this roundtable to a close. For those questions that were not answered, the Investor Relations Team will reach out to you. Also as a reminder, given the level of inbound sessions and the fluidity that is happening in Eastern Europe at the moment, I'd refer you to the ASX release. We've put out an issue today. We're trying to be as open and transparent as possible, but we're also trying to look after the safety and welfare of our people. We appreciate your understanding associated with that.
Our next update will most likely be in May, which will be our half year period ending that is in March. With that I'd like to thank you for your ongoing support. To the over 140 people who've attended today, thank you for persevering with the technology issues that we have. This is a live recording, so a transcript and a copy of that recording will be available on our website as well as practically possible. With that, please everyone stay safe. Take care and thank you for your ongoing interest and support of Aristocrat. Have a good day.
Thank you.