Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Aristocrat's second virtual management roadshow. My name's Rohan Gallagher, and along with Linda Assolari, we look after the Investor Relations program here at Aristocrat. Today we have several members of our executive management team: Mr. Trevor Croker, our CEO, good morning, Trevor. We have Mr. Mitchell Bowen, who runs our gaming and transformation operations, good morning, Mitch. Making her equity market debut, we have Natalie Toohey, our Chief Corporate Affairs Officer. Conscious of we're heading into our 31 March period end and we'll be going into blackout, we're keen to have open and fair access to our senior management team. We've got over 100 registered guests. Thank you for submitting your questions. We'll go through as many questions as we can in the allocated one hour.
For those questions that we can answer, and we cannot make it due to time constraints, I'll reach out separately at the end of this call to those participants. With that, without further ado, I'll open the meeting and the round table, and I'll ask Trevor, first of all, if you could just give a quick update from your perspective around how the performance of the strategy of the company's gone. Thanks, Trevor.
Yeah, thanks, Rohan. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for your time and continued interest in Aristocrat. When we went into COVID, we said that we were going to lead the industry out of this pandemic, and we said we were going to lead it out through being people-first, customer-centric, and focusing on business resilience and operations. I can sit here today and say that we are achieving on all of those objectives as we come out of this period with COVID activity. If I go back and reflect on what we have done from our people-first, as we were the only manufacturer to continue continuous delivery of games and invest behind our D&D portfolio, including opening two new studios during this period of time, which you can see flows through in the Eilers & Krejcik Gaming survey on game performance and cabinet performance, only published last week.
If I then look at what do we do from a customer-centric point of view, we have had recent NPS data suggesting that we are continuing to improve in our NPS consistently over the last period of time and making major inroads in both the size and the quality of the transactions that we're doing with our customers. Finally, about business resiliency, the business is in great shape. We have continued to work hard through this period of time, allocating resources and prioritization. We've focused on liquidity of the organization and also preserving, or not preserving, but making sure we have the strength in our balance sheet and capacity for the next wave of growth of Aristocrat. We still see M&A as an accelerator of growth for our company, and we're well positioned for the right opportunities aligned with our strategy to do that.
All in all, we took the time to refresh our strategy this period of time. We've continued to execute on that strategy, and I can point to a number of points of where we've been able to do that. No doubt, Mitchell will talk to those in the gaming business. I can also talk to where we've been able to move our digital business over to a more than $2 billion revenue business now, with a good diversified portfolio across social casino, strategy, casual genres. With social casino, we're continuing to take share against our major competitors in the social casino market and grow above category. In strategy, we now have the number one Western title in Raid, continuing to scale that product as well.
More recently, with the casual games, the launch of EverMerge, which is making great progress and is now the clear number two in the merge category, overall positioning Aristocrat in the Western world as a top five mobile games producer. With that, Rohan, I think it's probably best we head into some questions.
Yeah, fantastic. Thanks, Trevor. We have a lot of questions around growth. Obviously, we see ourselves at Aristocrat as a growth company. What growth options do you think that we have across the business and beyond at this particular point in time, Trevor?
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we do see ourselves as a growth company, and I think what we said, what I said at the start there is we've come out of this period with momentum. We've come out with a clear purpose and focus. If I look at the gaming business, I can still see our ability to take share, and you will have seen some of the Eilers reports coming out recently, and we're continuing to take share in the categories in which we participate. We've got adjacencies where we can enter new adjacencies, whether it's Illinois, VLT, whether it's other VLT markets, New York Lottery . We see all these adjacencies as a natural build on the capabilities that we already have as an organization and also the strengths that we can bring to entering those markets. On a gaming point of view, great momentum there.
I'd like to point specifically to the CX team or our customer service team. They've done a great job in developing cashless and contactless transactions for the systems business, and we can see that continuing to be able to grow as more and more of those trends become real in the retail gaming environment. If you then move to the digital world, now we have got three strong portfolios between casino, casual, and strategy and RPG. We see the ability to continue to expand into those genres and also expand in other adjacencies, which we've discussed with you in the past. During this period of time, we have been building talent. We have been bringing more talent into the organization.
We've been able to secure great talent into leadership roles, but also building talent relationships as we expand in studios through Neskin and Proteus through the period of time as well. All of that said, from our core businesses, we have the ability to continue to expand and grow. There are natural other adjacencies, and one of those is RMG. It's a near proximity to what we currently do. It is an option for us, as are other options around the industry as a whole.
Fantastic. Now, Trevor, the market loves a good catalyst, and there's no better catalyst than M&A. We've had a lot of questions around M&A, particularly given the strength of the balance sheet courtesy of those strong free cash flows that we do generate. What are your thoughts on M&A, and are there any gaps in the portfolio at the moment that you'd like to close out?
Yeah, thanks, Rohan. I think, certainly M&A has been an accelerator of growth for Aristocrat. If you go back and look at the four M&As we've done, each one of those has been a catalyst to our waves of growth as an organization. We continue to take a very pragmatic and disciplined approach to the way we think about M&A, both from a strategic point of view and also an operations and capabilities point of view as well. We'll continue to evaluate opportunities in our markets, whether they're in the gaming market, whether they're in the digital market, or whether they're in other adjacencies. We continue to be in the flow and evaluating those options which suit our strategic objectives, which we shared with you in the full year results in our strategic driven. We continue to be pragmatic about that.
We also are disciplined around the way that we create long-term shareholder value as opposed to short-term transactions and are focused on what we need to fill out our portfolio. As I said earlier, there is natural growth we have in both land and digital, but there are also acquisitions that continue to accelerate our growth as well.
Fantastic. One of the more popular questions we've received is around real money gaming, which is interesting given that we're actually not in there. Can you just give us a bit of a background as to why we haven't entered that market as the US markets are opening up at the moment, but even historically, where we've been?
Yeah, so we have been monitoring this market for some period of time. We did have content in the real money marketplace about five years ago. We no longer have any content being distributed in that marketplace as a whole. We're obviously watching the way that the market is evolving. At this stage, there's only six states that have legalized in North America, and I think there's a lot more headlines around what's happening in North America, RMG, than what's happening in actual traction. We continue to monitor that and keep looking at what the options could be longer term.
Trevor, my understanding, real money gaming, there's sports betting, there's online gaming or iGaming, and then there's iLotteries. James Robertson from the Lion experience team asks specifically around online gaming or iGaming. What are your thoughts around the potential to grow into that particular category given the potential overlap with content?
Yeah, thanks, James. If you go back to what we are as a company, we're a content technology and distribution company, and we make great content. We continue to support and invest behind technology, and we look for new ways to distribute that. The ways that we could enter into an online or an iGaming space is with our customers. Our customers are asking us to enter into those segments and producing product for them in the iGaming slots perspective. There is iGaming slots. There's also casino, bingo, live table, and sports that all come towards a total portfolio. Our natural option would be to provide content, but there are other levels there. You can go in as a pure content play.
You could go in as a content aggregator, which would require a broader suite than just slots, or you can go in as a platform play. Those options are all out there, and we continue to listen to our customers and work with our customers on what their requirements are and what they want to do to be successful.
Fantastic. Trevor, on the same topic on iGaming, Elise Kennedy from Jarden has asked, do you see iGaming as a threat or an opportunity to your social casino gaming? Have you seen any changes in those states that have legalized at this date?
Yeah, thanks, Alice. Appreciate the question. That's naturally an important question when you think about the sort of the headlines that are coming out on the growth race. To date, of all those six states that we have been monitoring, we've seen iGaming as accretive to the overall market and continues to be that. Our belief is that there is a genuine option there for a different demographic and a different group of consumers to enjoy our products or to enjoy products in that segment. Therefore, we think that at this point in time, it's going to be accretive to the industry. So far, if you look at some of those more mature states like New Jersey, which have had it for a number of years now, we're continuing to see growth in our social casino business.
We're continuing to see growth in that market as a whole, and we're still seeing our land-based gaming customers are reporting good growth. It's a bit different with COVID, but they're still providing good growth there.
Fantastic. There may be one or two questions, so I'll take time. We'll come back to it. Let's move on to gaming and the land-based operations as many of you know it. Welcome, Mitchell Bowen. Mitchell, firstly, can you just provide a sort of a round-the-ground sort of helicopter view of the markets and how they're operating in this COVID-affected area at the moment?
Yeah, sure, Rohan. Thank you. Look, I think around the grounds wise, let's start sort of the international business. The EMEA, European South Africa region, as well as the Asia region, sort of remains largely inactive at this point for a myriad of reasons. There are some green shoots there. However, we will be, like we are in the other regions, very well prepared when those markets really start to get a bit more of activity and open up from a gaming perspective. We are working closely with our operators there. When you come locally here to Australia, it's really been very, very positive and certainly a lot more positive than our original assumptions going into what this recovery would look like. When you think about historic churn levels around that 10%, our assumptions were around maybe a third of that through 2021 and into early 2022.
Markets tracking above that, probably to just over half of those levels. Our game performance and our operational performance, we're tracking ahead of that. We're really happy with the depth and breadth of our library and our content. We've got games working from a myriad of studios across the ANZ market. The cabinet mix is performing well. The sort of tactical customer plan, our Aristocrat Assist, has really started to show and demonstrate some goodwill in the marketplace, and we're really capitalizing on some share growth there. I think ANZ customer-wise would be about, I would say, probably a fraction over 90% of machines that are active in the Australian New Zealand marketplace.
There's a little bit of sort of operator activity in that space, as I'm sure you're really reading about, with certainly in pub land and hotel land, where some of the larger players are looking to buy and scale as they go. There is a bit of movement there that we're watching. Overall, we're very happy with our recovery in the Australian market and certainly the customer sentiment that's coming out with our game performance and mix going forward. I turn to North America. Quite a similar story in that it's tracking ahead of our expectations in terms of a COVID recovery. We've got about probably a fraction over 90, 92% of venues that are opening now. Generally, between class three and class two install bases, you get about 75%-85% of the fleet that are activated at the moment.
We're tracking sort of 5%-7% above those levels, which again demonstrates the sort of tactical recovery plan that we put in during COVID, which is great. We are seeing higher coin-in levels than we would have anticipated. Player demand and the way operators have prioritized their marketing spend and making sure that they are looking after their patrons as they come into a safe environment. Trevor talked about some of the contactless solutions and the cleanliness solutions that have been put in around the industry. That's all tracking, I guess, ahead of our expectations, which is really positive.
Certainly, as Trevor referenced with the recent game performance and the reports that are coming out, we've had some great success there across both game ops in class three as well as class two and as well as our outright sale products with all of our studios, not just one or two, but pretty much all the studios featuring in the reports. Certainly, when you start to think about 18 of the top 25 games, the trends of players coming back into known mechanics, known products, and brands have really helped our recovery and certainly our overall fleet activation as we go through there. What else can I tell you about North America?
Let's go to a couple of the questions. Desmond from Goldman Sachs and David from Macquarie ask, how do you see the market size over the next few years? A good question is, has that view changed in the last six months?
Yeah, so I think if you look at North America, historically, we've had an outright sales market of 70,000-80,000. That's kind of a market number. The market number coming out of that was tracking well below that at sort of that 45,000 or 50,000 range. Our views on that haven't changed. Game sales and operators' use of discretionary capital is remaining tentative, I guess, at this point. That's all due to potential shutdowns, lockdowns, watching their operational expenditure and those sorts of things. I think we will look to see a slower recovery over the next 12-18 months in that outright sale market.
That said, this sort of risk-based approach that operators are taking, we have seen, whether it's artificial or not, but there is a bit of an increase in sort of the way they're buying in terms of these leasing models and things, which they don't have to outlay that capital, but they can get great-performing products on their floor, and it protects them against a potential shutdown. We are seeing a period. Too early to tell or to quantify what that looks like overall. Certainly, with our share growth in both the game sale and the gaming operations market, we are seeing some positive signs from operators. I think it's really the next sort of phase, I guess, Rohan, is as other things start to open up.
I know we've talked previously about operators prioritizing what food and beverage outlets they've got on, how much of the floor they've got activated, what events they're playing, what other things consumers have to spend their money on. I think that's sort of the next phase that says as things start to open up more in North America, more people get vaccinated and restrictions are eased, we'll start to see what that really is doing on player demand and coining levels and those sorts of things. That's kind of the next six to nine months of what we think what we're looking at.
Fantastic. Thanks, Mitch.
Did you want to add anything?
Just what about the openings, some of the new openings that you've been getting?
Yeah, so when we talk about the game sale markets and whatnot, we're certainly very comfortable with our new openings. Casinos like Saracen and those where we start to think about our market share in the game sales, and that's 18%-20% range. Our ship share tracking well above that. If you think about the Eilers report, we're going from 21%-25%, and we've considerably grabbed much higher than that in our new openings. With that COVID Assist package or Aristocrat Assist package, our focus on customers, our breadth and depth of our library, we are really starting to see some fantastic momentum for us in North America.
That operational financial support appears to have added a fair amount of goodwill with the customer. I know that is part of customer centricity, which is a key platform in Trevor's COVID response. In terms of the game floor, and I know it changes from market to market, even within actual corporates themselves, have you seen the change in the mix, Mitch, between lease and outright sale machines in the American market?
I think, again, I think it's important to understand the segmentation of the operators. I think we've talked about previously, we track fantastic share and overweight in our regional and tribal properties and then underweight in our sort of corporate destination style venues. Importantly, even in markets like Nevada or New Jersey, we are seeing some strengthening demand in those sort of destination style of markets as well, which is positive. I think from an overall financial perspective, when we think about operators and their mindsets, they are tending to think about how they can mitigate their risks or minimize their risks going forward, which has led to this. I'm going to call it temporary because it's too early to say it's a trend at this point, but certainly an increase in lease or gaming operations footprints.
We have certainly seen some increases in those products over the last six months or so.
Yeah, thanks. The industry's been very supported by a number of pieces of independent research, and Eilers we refer to on a regular basis. Shout out to Todd Eilers who I believe may be on the call today. In the last survey, we saw gaming ops. Two surveys ago, we saw gaming ops come off, and then we saw an install base increase. Some of our competitor recent quarterlies, we've seen some of those units taken off the floor. What's your read on that gaming ops market at this particular point in time, and how do you see us positioned?
Yeah, I think, Todd, as long as we're at the top of the charts, keep those reports coming, mate, keep those surveys happening. No, look, I think as much as we love that survey, they are just that. They are a sample of the overall market. I think where we've seen some historic growth, our markets like the East Coast and some of the southern states are where we've increased some share. You will see some volatility with a sample set like an Eilers report versus what we're seeing of our own internal data. Certainly, on an MAT basis, on a quarterly basis, we are seeing some great momentum in our gaming operations space.
In my time, Mitch at Aristocrat, the surveys sort of move around, but there's been a fairly consistent trend. The last survey looked pretty phenomenal from a company perspective, whether it be game sales, gaming ops, new game releases, cabinets, etc. What's your take on those recent survey results?
Can we do virtual high fives? No, we can't do that. What I would say is I think we've spoken previously around some of the decisions we've made during COVID around the investment in or continued investment in our D&D studios and making sure that not just D&D, but we've got a resilient supply chain, that we've got people focused on customer and operator needs because everybody was different. Obviously, making sure that we continue to invest in our R&D, both hardware, software, and our services because we know, you guys know, that we're only as good as our next game, our next cabinet, our next hardware or service, all those sorts of things. At the risk of sort of eradicating complacency and continue to drive innovation and excellence, we maintain that investment.
We are now seeing on those, if you take those performance reports, one of the nice things that we as a management team and as all our staff internally see is it represents the breadth and depth of all of our studios, right? It is not just one or two across the board. Whether it is talent that we have brought in the last couple of years or it is talent we have had for the last 10, they are all featuring in some way, shape, or form in not just the gaming operations or the game sales, but some of those adjacencies that Trevor talked about. We will continue to see that as we invest and grow into more and more of these adjacencies.
The breadth and depth of talent and capability, as well as the library, the portfolio being content, game, services, and so on, has really sort of been the highlight for us, which really shows the sustainability of how we can continue this going forward. We're not reliant on just one section or one product segment or one studio. We're performing across the board. That's personally what we talk about is how do we make sure we maintain that and continue to innovate and grow on it and deliver customers the next great game or the next innovative cabinet or solution in order to continue to take share and grow.
Yeah, fantastic. It just reiterates the outlook statement we had around our aspirations around taking share and continuing to grow regardless of the market size. Thanks for that, Mitch. Let's move on to our digital operations, which has been a successful diversification strategy over the last few years, which was really tested during COVID. Trevor, can you just talk about, first of all, the overall performance and what you're seeing in social casino?
Yeah, thanks, Rohan. I think we've spoken to investors a few times about what we needed to do to address our social casino business. That really took effect in January last year. We've seen that momentum build through the last 12 months and it continues to stay very, very strong. We are taking share against our major competitors in social casino. We've seen growth in particularly Lightning Link and Cash Express and also seeing good performance out of the rest of the social casino business. I feel very good about what the team has done in social casino, given it was the core of where we are. We now have used the word diversification in the context of our overall business. I didn't say that diversification now is across the whole digital business.
We're a strong portfolio in social casino, number two in its category, number one in the strategy and RPG category, and showing some real traction to being a stronger casual player with the number two in the merge segment and certainly continuing to grow and grow that segment as a whole. I think the team's done a great job, particularly around features, live ops, and built on that. That was a gap we had. We've definitely built that skill set and continue to be able to leverage it. If I look at performance year over year, I feel very comfortable about the step-up that we saw through COVID as being more of a permanent step-up than what we potentially had thought of initially. That certainly is continuing to flow through on an ongoing basis.
Fantastic. We talk about the portfolio and we develop games for the portfolio top-line growth, but you have got to be lucky as well as good. We organically have developed a world-class game in Raid: Shadow Legends in the sort of strategy RPG area. Bryan Raymond from Citi has asked about the performance of Raid. Has that plateaued now, or do you see continued growth from this particular franchise?
Yeah, thanks for the question, Brian. Look, Raid has been a great product and continues to keep growing. We are in an accumulative profit stage now. We're still seeing growth, but we're also seeing profitable growth coming through from an accumulative profit basis. Raid's sitting somewhere between $30 million-$35 million a month now as a business or as a product, sorry. We continue to see ways to use unique UA investment. We are still spending strong UA, but we're using alternative ways to do that to drive new users. We're finding that that, plus the incremental features that were released earlier this year around Tower and some of the new extra characters that have been added in, have actually brought in more depth to the game and continue to see it growing.
I still see growth in the Raid franchise, obviously not at the rates that we've been experiencing because it went through a very steep growth curve. Certainly, the product is differentiated. We're able to continue to reinvest in new and creative ways to attract users. We're finding that the cohorts that have come in are staying in the game for a long period of time.
If we look at you, you touched on diversification within the digital business, Trevor. It is seemingly unusual when you look at other publicly listed digital companies that can actually grow world-class games in different genres. It appears as though we have done this again with EverMerge in the casual segment. Can you just give us an update on EverMerge and its performance since its worldwide launch?
Yeah, so we launched EverMerge in May, soft launched last year in May, and it's continued to scale. I think last time we spoke to the market, we were guiding towards $5 million-$6 million a month in bookings. That's probably closer to $10 million now. We're continuing to see that product scale. Lots of new features coming out. There was some very good activity during the Valentine's period and some of these new island concepts that were out there. We are in that merge category. Knew it was only a small category when we entered it. We're growing the category, and we're also taking share. We're into the 20s as far as 20% shares and continuing to see an opportunity to continue to grow.
I feel very comfortable that both the relationship with Neskin, which is a new strategic relationship for us, the team's focus on how do we grow and aggressively grow that segment. You put that, you put Lightning Link, and you put Raid together, and they're three very strong portfolio games that any digital business would like to have. Each of those are, well, certainly Lightning Link and Raid are at profit stage, and EverMerge is not that far away.
Fantastic. Trevor, whilst Mancep Bondo, Sudhesh from UBS is asking, can you provide an update on the game pipeline?
Yeah, thanks, Sudhesh. Yeah, look, we've got about four games that are close to soft launch or very close to soft launch. As you know, we get these games into soft launch. We continue to tweak them and monitor them. Some of them, like Mech Arena, are certainly showing good retention signs now and is moving closer and closer towards worldwide launch. We've got about 12-15 games in the pipeline at any point in time. We've now got about four that are in soft launch. We've got one of those being Mech Arena, plus a couple of others in Magic Wars and Coin High, not Coin High, Eightball Smash, which are all sitting in the pipeline.
I think at this point in time, you would probably expect to see at least one come to market this year, maybe two, depending on how the soft launch metrics go.
One of the potential business risks for the digital business is the uncertainty that is IDFA. Sacha from Evans & Partners has sort of asked, what's the latest view around IDFA? What do you expect the impact to be, particularly on social casino and Raid?
Yeah, thanks, Sacha. As of last night, feedback from the platforms is that IDFA appears to have been delayed again, and it's looking towards late spring before we'll have more certainty on that. We've had no formal advice on it, but we have had conversations with the platforms, and we continue to talk with all stakeholders in the platform, not just Apple, Facebook, and Google, but to understand what's going on. We believe that that has been delayed because it was originally going to be sometime late March. We definitely had no indication on what's happening from that perspective. If we talk about what does it mean for us, we actually think this is where scale actually works for you. Having a scale business, a diversified scale business, provides us a lot of opportunity.
We've been working on various strategies around how do we market our products to users in a post-IDFA world. We've been running trials. Some of those trials have been very successful. If you look at Raid, some of the activity we're doing with Raid at the moment is TV advertising. It's driving very strong. It's driving good, strong traffic to the app itself. We're looking at other alternatives like that. As we said, we've been talking with the platforms, working with other platforms to work out what their place and position is going to be. I think what's happening at the moment is that we've done a lot of work, a lot of data science, a lot of testing to get ourselves comfortable that we believe we're well positioned for a post-IDFA world.
We don't believe we're competitively disadvantaged because of either the portfolio we've got or the size that we are in the organization as well.
Andy Auerbach has just asked, when we say delayed to late spring, which hemisphere are we referring to specifically? Recognizing that it's been delayed three times now, but that's a specific online question we've just received.
Great question, Andy. I was talking to people in London, so let's call it Northern Hemisphere spring.
All right, fantastic, fantastic. It seems Big Fish, Plarium, and Raid have had some tremendous organic growth, a real differentiator versus some of our public listed peers. Obviously, we have fast-tracked and accelerated that growth in the past via M&A with those examples. David from Macquarie has asked, can you scale up the business with studio deals, or do you need to acquire more businesses, Alaa, Plarium, Big Fish, etc.?
Yeah, thanks, David. The playbook that we've been using for the digital business to date has been to scale our technical talent, creative talent, like we do with our land-based business. That's where you've seen deals with Neskin, Proteus. There are others that we're working through at the moment as well as bringing in talent to build out our capability. If you look at the genesis of who we are as a company, we are a creative company. We make creative things. We bring talent in. We provide them the canvas, if you like, to be able to make that creative product. We go and market and distribute it and merchandise it for them, if you like. Is there opportunity? I still think there's still good talent deals to be had.
We are talking to talent that we would like to have join the risk group, particularly in the digital space. We are also talking to talent in the land-based world as well, to be frank. At the same time, there are opportunities for buying businesses. I guess where we are seeing the digital business at the moment is the multiples are pretty high. The one thing I do like about our digital business compared to most digital businesses is we are still making 30+% profit margins, which is different to the way a lot of the digital businesses operate where they are more focused on revenue. We believe we can grow revenue above category, and we can grow margins. We will have a much stronger and more profitable business longer term. It is there, David.
It's just a little bit more aggressive as far as pricing goes at the moment. That doesn't stop us from looking at many different targets over the last couple of months.
That's interesting. We don't actually look at the diversification benefits. I think the best performing game in Cashman to set our app right now is from our land-based Cash Express. It's great to see the synergies happening in two ways. In terms of a risk mitigant for IDFA, it's utilizing different platforms. We have our own platform in Plarium Play. Trevor, can you talk about how Plarium Play is performing? Is that a potential growth option for the business on a go-forward basis?
Yeah, Plarium Play has been around for about 15, 16 months now, I think it is, maybe slightly longer. It is our own PC platform. We have really been using Raid as the catalyst to grow that platform. From what we have seen to date, that is really nicely scaling each month. Incrementally, we are getting more users into that platform. As I may have mentioned before, the team at Plarium kindly remind me that this is one business where gross revenue equals net revenue. There is no platform fee involved, and they are very conscious of that opportunity. That has scaled nicely. I think it still continues to offer us opportunities for scaling. It is a more loyal player base. Also, there is an opportunity there potentially to publish more content through that platform, consistent with the type of genre that they currently use to supply me.
Fantastic. Let's move on from the operations for the time being. Let's move our attention towards ESG. ESG is really important. It's important to our people. It's important to our suppliers. It's important to the community. It's important to you, our investment stakeholders. With that, I'd welcome Natalie Toohey, our Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, to cover up a few questions, if I may, Natalie. First of all, welcome. Irene Yi from CBA Private is asking, how does Aristocrat actually incorporate ESG factors into its operations?
Yeah, thanks for the question. I guess I'd probably start by stressing what we don't do and what ESG isn't at Aristocrat. I would say it's absolutely not a kind of corporate-led exercise or an exercise that's predominantly about PR. What we're very much focused on from a group perspective is bringing the right level of insight and impetus, if you like, to the organization on these issues. It's the business that's accountable for delivery. The focus is very much on improving core business systems and processes and taking actions that make us a better and a stronger business and are really aligned to the strategy, so really facilitate delivery of strategy.
Just to make that point, I guess upfront, we also take a very disciplined approach in terms of focusing all our attention on the issues that are really material for our business, so the things that obviously drive value or could stop us from executing strategy and capturing value. We do take a lens in making that assessment, which is not only about our business today, but also how we expect it to transform and the views of our people and, as Rohan mentioned, our stakeholders, including our investors and prospective investors.
In terms of where we're focused right now, we have those six key areas, which I'd encourage everybody to kind of explore on the website in our disclosures: responsible gameplay being our most obvious leadership opportunity and a real strategic driver as well, corporate governance, community and society, people-first aspects, so employee relations, diversity, and inclusion, and also ethical sourcing, which includes modern slavery commitments, ethical supply chain, and finally, energy and environment. I guess with respect to each of those topics, we've got very clearly articulated objectives that sit with leaders across the business, articulating what we are wanting to achieve in terms of progress. All of these agendas, I think it's fair to say, it's not a one-and-done. It's an ongoing exercise of making improvements and then planning further improvements off the basis of those.
We definitely take a kind of a medium-term view, albeit we do drive for progress, very specific outcomes on an annual basis through the performance management system. We also apply a broader risk lens to what we're doing in total. We do periodically check in with our enterprise risk, the board-level, the board-endorsed risk appetite statements, and we plug into the in terms of the overall management of the effort. It is very pragmatic. It is very much focused on embedding and improving through our core systems and processes. It is very much business-led.
I guess just perhaps a couple of examples, measurable improvements in our diversity and inclusion performance is an example of what we're shooting for currently, complying fully with our modern slavery disclosure obligations, continuing to lift the bar in terms of our governance and really being a leader in terms of governance, and bringing forward product innovations in the responsible gameplay space and driving a culture, really, of engaging with responsible gameplay. Pragmatic, practical, targeted, and business-led would be my summary.
If you had a look at ESG, there's a number of planks. The first person with being responsible gameplay is the most critical. I think it's also important just to take into consideration that gaming is a state-by-state regulatory body. Therefore, compliance and governance is really super critical. We've seen that play out in recent times, both locally and internationally. I would never sort of gloss over those particular areas. In terms of our way forward, Natalie, what do you see the priorities for ESG over the next 6 to 12 months?
Yes, thanks, Rohan. I guess from an overarching perspective, we're currently focused right now on updating our materiality assessment. We last did that a couple of years ago. Clearly, the business has transformed in the interim. Plenty of other things have changed in our external environment and also internally, in terms of stakeholder expectations. I do know that a number of people on this call did participate and shared your views as part of that update process. I just want to say thank you because it's excellent to have a strong investor voice and perspective coming through that, helping us, guiding us around which issues we need to focus on going forward. Thank you. I think from an issues perspective, it's many of the things that I called out, I just referenced. Continuing to operationalize our commitments in responsible gameplay.
In other words, taking those kind of policy statements and aspirations and really embedding them in the core operational processes of the business, whether that's around product, whether that's around marketing and how we go to market and engage with customers, whether that's around things like staff engagement, culture, training, compliance. Many, many threads to the RG effort. What we're really focused on is making sure that we are doing what we say we will do and really embedding those very much into the core business processes and functions. We've got a number of very senior cross-functional leadership groups that are helping us kind of really drive that through the business. Again, very business-driven, whether that's at a product level or, as I say, on other issues. I think we're making very good progress, I would say.
We're really looking forward to bringing more color to that progress when we release our next iteration of disclosures towards the end of the year. I think we're making really great ground in digital. I think we're actually already very clearly leading in social casino in terms of the RG initiatives that we've brought to bear already. If you look at what we're doing in gaming, we've hit a really exciting milestone recently with the commercialization of FlexiPlay in New South Wales. For those who don't know, FlexiPlay is an innovative EGM product that builds on previous trials. We've got a real track record of investing in trials and product innovation in this space. It allows players to voluntarily set time limits and to also quarantine winnings to prevent them from being played down.
Our customers have been very interested in and supportive of these sorts of initiatives from us, as have policymakers, regulators. We are really looking forward to learning more from this and using those lessons to really feed into further product innovations in the future. A couple of other priorities I have touched on briefly. We are spending a fair bit of time at the moment really understanding our greenhouse gas emission profile as a business. I mean, as Trevor mentioned, we are really an ideas business at heart. We do not have a kind of a particularly obvious kind of heavy carbon profile. We really feel that in addition to delivering on our response to the TCFD and our program of disclosures there, we want to do more work to really get underneath our profile and what abatement options could look like to really background future decision-making in that area.
We're spending a fair bit of time on that now. We've also submitted our first modern slavery statement for Australia, which is a pretty hefty piece of work and a hefty disclosure. We understand that will be published at the end of the month. That's been supported with mandatory staff training and a lot of other activities. Again, another very important focus for our business. I'll probably just end by mentioning the raising of the bar on governance. As Rohan mentioned, governance really is the most important thing that you can do well, that you must do well for a business like ours. You may have seen that we recently appointed a former Nevada state regulator and actually a globally influential and credentialed gaming regulator in A.G. Burnett to the board's risk and compliance committee as an independent member.
Our expectation is that AG will bring some real rigor to or just really add to the rigor and add new perspectives to the deliberations of that committee. We are continuing to look for what we can do to bolster and further improve and really innovate in the governance space to keep Aristocrat at the forefront. There are a few examples. Clearly, it is a hugely enormous agenda. We are trying very much to continue to focus on what moves the dial in our business and for our stakeholders. Always with a very business-led lens rather than a PR one. It is a journey. It is iterative, as I mentioned. We will continue to do more as we achieve more and build on those foundations.
We are very pleased with where we are at the moment and really looking forward to bringing forward a new round of disclosures on our annual calendar.
Fantastic, Natalie. Thank you very much. We do look forward to sharing those achievements. The teams collectively across the globe are pulling together in the ESG. We really feel as though we are the responsible guardians of the gaming industry, and we're going to lead accordingly, which is fantastic. We know we've got the full support of both Trevor and the board in this particular area. Now, we'll just touch on a couple of financial questions briefly. They are around, number one, SG&A, number two, tax, and number three, liquidity. All exciting stuff. Sacha and Peter Marks from Morgan Stanley, welcome to the coverage universe, Peter, have asked around an increase in SG&A across the business, considering bad debts, provisions, redundancy costs, etc., etc. The 24-prong one question in relation to SG&A.
The key takeaways here around SG&A is that this is a growth company, and we will invest to grow. Pre-COVID, we had a number of projects for sustainable growth over the longer term. During COVID, we had to make some decisions to pause and reprioritize those tasks. We mainly took some temporary costs out, which we returned back into the business, where we're going to continue to grow in areas such as IT, as well as CX or systems that Trevor touched on earlier, as well as D&D. Now, if you have a look at our business, we're largely an asset-light fixed-cost business. Those costs center around talent, innovation, and design and development in particular. We have an unwavering commitment in that particular area. Yes, it will increase our cost base, but we see it more as an investment in the long term.
In terms of the provisions in September 2020, we did say, "Look, in hindsight, we hope that if we're going to be criticized for anything, it's being conservative." That may play out. What we saw at the moment at September last year, we saw half of the global market closed, including Australia. With Victoria in shutdown, we had Latin America closed, we had Asia closed, Europe closed, etc. We did make some of those provisions, particularly around doubtful debts. We're hopeful that they may not continue. Obviously, we'll have a rigorous test around our period and around that particular area. We will continue to invest in SG&A. We don't anticipate the quantum of provisions to be as significant as they were in the past. We do acknowledge that we do face an FX headwind coming through.
I'd refer you to the notes of the accounting annual report where one cent is around AUD 12 million in NPATA. We are up against some headwinds, which will offset any benefits from not providing additional provisions. In terms of tax, now, we're going to scratch the surface, but we're not going to go too deep because you've probably got the wrong person involved in this response. We had a question from Rohan Sundram of Macquarie and David Fabris from Macquarie around the potential tax increases in the U.S. Yes, we saw a change of government. Yes, we saw the Democrats considering talking about an increase in corporate tax from 21% to 28%. That has sort of settled down, although we do understand that there's more stimulus and there's potential for that effective tax rate to go up over time. The U.S. is a very significant part of our business.
It's around 70% of both gaming and digital on a normalized market. If you saw an effective tax rate increase, all things being equal, you would see a rise in our effective tax rate on a pro rata or on a weighted average basis. However, what I would refer you to is the notes of the accounts, notes 1.4, where we have about $1 billion in deferred tax assets. In the event of an effective tax rate increase, you would see the value of those assets go up to offset to a large degree. The bottom line is that we may see an effective tax rate increase over the longer term, but that would be mitigated by the access to those deferred tax assets. Finally, in regards to liquidity, liquidity was a key platform as part of the COVID response.
We wanted to make sure that we could turn the lights, and we wanted to be there for our people. We wanted to be there for our suppliers. Now, some companies took the path of raising equity and permanently diluting shareholders. We took the approach of temporarily raising debt. We increased our revolving credit facilities. We also took out an incremental term loan of around $500 million. The only downside to that is that we had to draw that cash down. Putting that money to work has been challenging. It is reflected in that outlook statement around the effective interest expense of around 5% throughout FY2021. It is a great problem for us to have. It is something that we will work through over time when we feel ready. That is something that is work in progress for the broader team.
In the event of no other questions, I'll hand over to Trevor for a bit of a wrap-up from his perspective on how things are performing in the first half of this year's date. Thanks, Trevor.
Yeah, thanks, Rohan. Thanks for your time. I could probably put it into three or four buckets. First of all, I'm very impressed and very happy with the real traction, sustainable traction that the business has achieved through this period of time. We thought we were going to be achieving certain things, and we're certainly ahead of those expectations, largely driven by a clear purpose and strategy and excellent execution across all the organizations. From that point of view, we're getting real and sustainable traction, which is ahead of my expectations. The second part is we're really well now. We're now really well positioned for growth as the industry starts to rebound.
The question about what's going to happen as people start to travel and casinos start to reopen, etc., etc., Aristocrat's well positioned, not just from a product portfolio, but from a customer relationships point of view, from the ability to invest and support our customers to reopen and grow, and our digital business with the momentum that's still continuing to be there for Raid and also building on EverMerge. I feel that the business is actually well and truly positioned to take advantage of the growth opportunity that's going to come as people start to renormalize their lives post this period of time. The third part is the diversification, as we talked about a couple of times, but if you think about what diversification has done for Aristocrat through this period of time, it's strengthened our company.
It's made us a better company, and it's given us a lot more optionality than we would have had if we had been a pure-play gaming business. To have a scaled digital business and a scaled gaming business now gives us a lot of options, both to reinvest in what we've got, to continue to build on our financial strengths, or to grow M&A in either of those businesses or other adjacencies that we want to go for. I think to Natalie's point, governance is still such an important part of a good organization as good organizations have good governance, and governance can be an enabler. People will often see governance and these regulatory and risky aspects as a slowing down of an organization.
We see our social right to operate as a very important part of who we are as a company, and we're building a very strong and continuing to build a very strong culture around governance and leadership with that. As I said earlier, we want to be a leader in the industry, and being a leader in the industry means you lead in all aspects of the industry. I mean, finally, I guess I'll just come back to where I sit on this whole thing. I've said it a couple of times, but it's no more apparent to me today than ever before as the next 10 years at Aristocrat are going to be better than the last 10 years. I can point to so many small things that cumulatively give me that confidence.
We generally have to go back a week and pull up the Eilers reports and look at our game performance and share of games. You look at the cabinet performance. You then look at how the digital business is actually going and building momentum. This business is poised for continuous and strong growth for the next decade, and I'm more confident now than I've ever been about the ability to continue to grow this business. It's not just a one-year. We build this business for long-term growth. This is not about just making a 2021 number or a 2022 number. We believe we can continue to grow this business for a long period of time. That's what guides all of our investment decisions and our strategy around how do we continue to build long-term sustainable growth.
I'm even more bullish, as I sit here today, about the future of Aristocrat for the next 10 years.
Outstanding. Great wrap. We do have two live questions, one on gaming and one on digital, conscious of time. If I refer to yourself first, Mitch, Larry Gandler, our friend Larry from Credit Suisse in Melbourne. Just a clarification around gaming operations, are some of the for sale products now being leased in the US?
Larry, I would think about that as are some of the for sale products now being leased? Yes, but more operating leases. They are starting to minimize their upfront capital and take a fee per day on content versus buying the whole thing outright to kind of maximize their optionality. Yes, but it is not a huge number at this point.
Okay. Fantastic. Final question on the digital for Trevor, from Sacha at Evans & Partners, can you give an indication of how PC bookings for Raid are tracking?
No, Sacha, they continue to grow every month, and they've grown off a very small number. It is a small number, to be honest with you. The percentage growth is extremely positive and very satisfying to see them continuing growing every month. We're seeing month-on-month compounding growth in the Plarium Play platform. As I said, it's only a very small number at the moment. It started off from zero about 15, 16 months ago, but it is growing, and it's growing at a very fast rate. I don't know if it'll ever be as big as people think platforms can be, but certainly, it's a nice accretive part to our business, and we're learning a lot about how to distribute and present product in a PC environment. Very happy with the growth rates on that.
Fantastic. Thank you, Trevor. Thank you for all those questions and for all those people who have registered up your time to invest in Aristocrat. It would be remiss of me not to thank a couple of people behind the scenes, including Claire, Linda, and Francis, both for their support. We greatly appreciate it. It is a collaborative team effort here at Aristocrat, so we really appreciate it. Always welcome to receive constructive criticism or advice or guidance in terms of whether this is effective use of your time and where we can improve the process on a go-forward basis. In the meantime, I'd just like to close out. Thank everybody for your time today and for those people traveling locally. Travel safe, and we look forward to talking to you at our half-year results on Monday, May 24. With that, I'd like to close the meeting.
Thank you very much. Have a great day.
Thanks, everybody. Thank you.