Good morning. Welcome to Racing and Sports Investor Webinar to discuss the company's first half FY 2026 results. On today's webinar from the company, we have Managing Director and CEO, Stephen Crispe, CFO, Tim Olive, and Strategic Communications Manager, Eliza Yaxley. To ask a question, please submit them via the Q&A button on the screen. We'll do our best to get through as many of those as possible. I'll now hand it over to Stephen.
Wonderful. Thanks, Ben, thank you everyone for joining the Racing and Sports half year presentation. Look, we'll do questions at the end of the seminar, so look forward to receiving those, we'll kick off. Racing and Sports is trusted by the world's leading racing and industry brands. We process an eye-watering amount of data every day, this enables us to reliably serve our global customer base with the most data-rich and credible racing products in the industry globally. Some of the brands we serve are there, and also some of the high-level statistics, as you can see on the screen, show the size and quantum of the Racing and Sports enterprise as it stands today. Next slide. The first half of FY 2026.
We sustained strong growth across the first half of 2026, which has really been underpinned by the continued momentum in the complete racing solution and data and content products. This has been supported by strategic investment in our core trading platform and technologies, as well as the expansion of the global trading team. Our investment in Asia continues to perform well and continues to provide a solid base for continued expansion in the region, and there's good momentum in the conversion of deals from the pipeline through to contracts as well. LeoVegas Group has come online, Fairplay and other trading deals have also been signed, and the business continues to leverage a strong base.
It's great global reputation and brand, and the ability to deliver sustained strong revenue growth and capitalize on the growth initiatives and investments that have been made across the first half, and into the second half of FY 2026. With that, I'll hand over to Tim to talk us through some of the first half key financial highlights.
Thank you, Stephen, thanks for joining us this morning, everyone, to talk through the results for the first half of FY 2026. This slide presents some of our key financial metrics for the first half of the year, and I'll just run through the highlights around those. Revenue for the first half of the year was AUD 13.9 billion, which was up 38% on the prior year. We really saw growth across all sort of functional areas, and we were also aided by the addition of the Hong Kong acquisition, which wasn't there in the first half last year. I'm pleased to say that we're on track for our fifth straight year of 30%+ revenue growth, you know, positioning Racing and Sports as an ongoing high-growth company. Moving over to our normalized EBITDA.
For the period, it was AUD 1.4 million, which was broadly in line with last year. I should note with our EBITDA, we've normalized the result to adjust for a couple of non-recurring items that were a little abnormal and won't continue going forward. That flows through some of our profit metrics. From an ARR perspective, we reported ARR at the end of the period of AUD 24.6 million, which was up 34% on the prior year. Continuing to grow strongly and up about AUD 3 million on the last reported number. It's also important to note that we have a further AUD 3 million in repeatable revenue from our Asian business around publication sales on a B2C basis.
That really means that our exit rate for recurring revenue at the end of H 1, FY 2026, is AUD 27.6 million. From a cash perspective, cash at the end of the period was AUD 4.4 million. You know, down slightly on the last reported period, but reflecting that investment we made in a couple of our major growth areas. From a normalized cash flow from operations perspective, we've had a normalized inflow of AUD 800,000, which was slightly better than the prior period. This graph shows a time series of half-year results for our key financial metrics. It's pleasing to say we continue to achieve strong, sustained growth across our revenue categories, across all businesses. Revenue has grown strongly over that period, and we've now had eight consecutive halves since listing of strong revenue growth.
From an ARR perspective, the revenue here, it is worth noting that the bar does still include Stake, who we've announced will not continue beyond May. It does not include LeoVegas, which is a really meaningful revenue deal we announced through the half year, which will come on board mid-year as well. You know, that's a couple of notable points there. From our profit metrics perspective, we've made a significant investment in capability building in the first half of FY 2026, despite this, normalized EBITDA has remained stable. From a normalized net profit perspective before tax, we've seen a slight decline in FY 2026 to date, and this is due to the significant investments we've made in the business to support future growth.
It's also important to note that H 1 includes the Hong Kong racing off-season, so we're probably still looking to educate the market around the seasonality of our Asian business. You know, Hong Kong racing has an off-season in the first half of the year, which means that revenue and profit will be stronger for our RAS Asia business in the second half of the year. It's valuable to note also that our BAU business made a normalized profit in H 1, and also at a group level, our after-tax profit, or our business presented a profit after tax on a normalized basis as well. You know, still some good profit metrics despite a slight decline in the headline rate.
Moving into our key business segments and also a geographic breakdown here, look, it's pleasing to see that the investments in Wagering Tech and Asia have continued to drive diversification of revenue by jurisdiction, and also to deliver strong growth in our ARR over prior years. Going through our business units, Enhanced Information Services is our most mature segment. It continued to grow strongly in FY 2026, up 17% to reach AUD 14.7 million at the end of the period. From a wagering technology perspective, it continues to be our highest growth business segment, and it accelerated further in the first half of FY 2026, up 67% on the prior year, and now contributes a really meaningful AUD 7.5 million of ARR.
From the perspective of digital publications, media, and other revenue, we've seen strong growth in this segment, and that's reflected through the Asian acquisition coming online in FY 2025, and it's also been aided by some revenue from the other area of the MTC deal, which we'll talk more about later on. Regionally, the U.K. continued to grow strongly, up 49% on prior year, and our ARR in Asia has now grown to make up 7% of our total ARR. Again, important to note, that doesn't include AUD 3 million of revenue for repeatable B2C publication sales. Thanks, Eliza. I'll throw back to Steve to talk about some investments and growth.
Wonderful. Thanks, Tim. As Tim has touched on, that the first half of FY 2026 has had a key thematic around investment for growth, and this is really important. We've done a lot of heavy lifting in the first half in terms of investing for sustained growth within the Racing and Sports global business. Obviously, we bought on RAS Asia, invested significantly there in management, technology, and operations. We've obviously included the U.K. team and expansion into the trading, the global trading team, in that region as well as here in Australia. As well as many other technological advances in terms of our core platforms, our products, and other services within the business.
Some of those high-growth initiatives have been really prioritized to set the business up for future scale and future growth, to really support the revenue roadmap that the business is committed to. To drive automation and platform enhancements, these are really important in terms of taking some of the inefficiencies that have grown into the business out and replace those with, you know, technology advancements, automation, artificial intelligence. Right-sizing the business for scale is really important, that we, you know, as we continue to grow, we make sure that we have the right people, the right expertise, and the right skills in the right areas within the business globally. Of course, that's treated resource alignment, so making sure the right people are in the right places at all times to enable and facilitate that growth.
I'll hand to Tim to talk about some of the more tangible and visible outcomes of these initiatives that we've had over the past six months. Over to you, Tim.
Thanks, Stephen. With our investment in Wagering Technology, as you can see here, that's driven revenue growth from an ARR perspective of AUD 3 million or 67% year-on-year. We're seeing a really strong return on that investment, and we're now in a position where we have our own proprietary full trading suite, including our NTS, our trading platforms, and our BetBridge product. We go forward with a full suite of products that we can sell to the market in that high-yielding Wagering Technology sector. From an Asian perspective, the investment in the business resulted in a new international simulcast product, which we'll talk more about later, which will be an accelerant of revenue going forward.
We've also invested in high-growth digital assets and modernizing our IT platforms. We think we're really well positioned, yeah, to drive revenue and growth going forward for Asia. I'll pass back to Stephen to talk about our business update.
Thanks very much, Tim. Racing and Sports has continued deploying its complete racing and fully integrated services to clients around the globe over the past half. Some of these include the likes of QuinnBet in the U.K., who are on the Playbook Engineering platform, and they've been expanding their racing offering, which has been a pleasing relationship and deal for us going forward. Stakemate, who are a next-generation proprietary sportsbook platform, who are very much in the social betting and social experience space. Racing and Sports has formed a very meaningful and productive relationship with the Stakemate group. We've onboarded Best Odds. We've expanded a global tier one client for trading services, and of course, the Stake deal, which will be coming to an end in May this year. Going forward, LeoVegas.
This was one of the big announcements in our business update over the past number of months. This deal is due to go live in 2026 towards the middle of the year. It really is a milestone international agreement. It's a qualifier for Racing and Sports data content and Managed Trading Service, which was proven in a global competitive tender process, where Racing and Sports was chosen above other competitors within the global marketplace. It really does establish Racing and Sports as a credible tier one global racing NTS provider. We will be developing and delivering their full integrated racing service for BetMGM U.K. and Bet UK and other brands amongst the group, which is an exciting and wide-scale implementation and deployment process.
Something we're all excited about, seeing as it comes live later on in the year. It really does strengthen Racing and Sports as an independent alternative to incumbent providers and a real disrupter to the established U.K. and global industry for delivery of these fully integrated complete racing services and solutions.
Excellent.
Excitingly, we've launched BetBridge into the market, which is our fully managed embedded racing product. This really targets customers who, you know, are after something which is complete turnkey out of the box, who may not have racing experience or expertise that's required to run a racing product within their business, who also have a short time to get a product in the market. This is a rapidly deployable product that's embedded in a customer's sportsbook or platform of any size, whether it be a small Tier Three all the way up to a Tier One operator that integrates seamlessly on their platform.
Racing and Sports manages everything from cradle to the grave, with that platform, everything from the front end, UX/UI, all the way through to accepting bets, managing liabilities, trading, resulting, and all those services that you'd expect. Custom UX/UI can be tailored very quickly, this is all configurable within the platform and the product, and it really does provide an exciting new product in the Racing and Sports armory for customers who really want to get accelerated on racing very quickly, that have no expertise or experience in that, in that space. Excitingly, Fairplay Exchange in the U.K. are our first customer on the platform, and they've now been operational for several months, and they continue to evolve and grow with them and for their customers as well.
Betbridge is a very exciting product, and you'll see more about Betbridge as we continue to onboard clients, according to the pipeline of customers. The Mauritius Turf Club. Again, this is an industry-based solution, which is a new product within the Racing and Sports business that we've been working on for quite some time, and sort of builds on the work we've done with the GBGB, which we've covered off in many previous presentations. The MTC have had the successful first season, which has gone very well, and obviously coming into the second season, commencing shortly. The tech platform continues to evolve and mature. The MVP was obviously delivered for the first season, but that wasn't the finish line.
The finish line certainly continues as we work with Mauritius Turf Club, creating new features, functionality for their race day office system, their database management, their handicapping framework, and ecosystem. We're working on retail solutions, so visual retail solutions, engagement solutions for e-enhanced fan engagement. We're working on tote systems and vision feeds, as well as fixed odds trading capabilities, and also looking at working with the Mauritian Turf Club around the syndication of their product externally, internationally, as well as import of international racing into Mauritius as well. There's a lot of work to do for the Mauritius Turf Club project, and an opportunity, and this will continue over the coming half and years to come. In the U.K. market, strong growth has continued, pleasingly.
Some of the key activities, obviously, we've signed the LeoVegas Group deal. You know, the Operator Managed Trading platform, previously known as our SaaS platform, has, you know, continued to be deployed with Archon Group going live in 2025. The MTS clients, yeah, clients continue to grow, and our MTS capability continues to become sought after as best-in-class and best-in-market within the, within the region. There are other customers who are continuing to evolve their offerings that we've delivered to them through our MTS and our Operator Managed Platform as well. There's integrations with Ulta, which is ongoing for additional work, trading, content, data, and digital.
With that, I'll hand over to Tim to talk about some of the key drivers within the U.K. market going forward.
Thanks, Stephen. Look, it's pleasing to say we've still got a really strong pipeline in the U.K., we've also got our established deals with our pipeline or our platform provider partners that provide us a sort of continuous range of opportunities to onboard new wagering brands. We're really, yeah, strengthening our product to be a real next-gen racing product, including a range of derivative markets, yeah, which are very high margin for wagering operators. Gives us another point of differentiation. From a financial perspective, it's been a real success story for us. ARR is continuing to grow strongly, reaching AUD 8.5 million at the end of the half. With LeoVegas and other deals still to come, we think we've got really strong growth momentum ahead. Moving over to talk about our Asian business.
It's been a big six months of strengthening the net foundations for RAS Asia, and also progressing the strategy for a sustained period of growth in revenue and profit for the region. As I said earlier, the Hong Kong racing off-season runs from around mid-July to early September, meaning that H 1 is much quieter in terms of revenue and profit outcome. We should see that strengthening in the back half of the year. Pleasing to say, we're tracking ahead of expectations in the 1st half of the year, despite that off season. We've put in place a highly credentialed leadership team to drive our RAS Asia business, led by Ronnie Tay.
Ronnie's a very well-known executive in the region, with very strong knowledge in the space and deep networks across Asia, so we think he's the right person to lead our growth strategy in Asia. Pleasingly, in the first half of the year, we introduced a new international simulcast product ahead of time. This is a completely new revenue source for our RAS Asia business. This is a multi-channel strategy to promote international racing that's imported into Hong Kong, and it's very lucrative, the turnover in Hong Kong, so a very significant revenue source for rights holders. Racing and Sports provides a new opportunity for them to really promote their product in Hong Kong and hopefully in Asia, more broadly, to drive revenue growth for them and monetize that opportunity for us.
We're also progressing with a tech uplift around our core systems, which will provide, you know, enhanced product and also a more efficient business and allow us to be more agile. That's a really positive sort of strategy as well. We've launched some new digital assets in the region, most notably the hkdnforum.com, and I'm pleased to say that traffic is growing very rapidly there, and that'll be a real asset to the business going forward and give us an omni-channel strategy that also, yeah, hits first-time audience and more digital native clients.
From an outlet perspective for RAS Asia, racing is set to commence in mainland China in October 2026. We think this presents an opportunity for us to really access a much broader market, and also benefit from the additional race meetings that come into Hong Kong. The mainland China race meetings will go on top of the existing Hong Kong meetings, so there'll be an underlying unitary driver there. With the international simulcasts, we'll have a full year of selling that new product going forward into FY27. The Hong Kong Jockey Club have committed to increasing the number of race meetings they import from international jurisdictions. We expect this to be a trend going forward for multiple years and will be another unitary growth driver for that business.
We've got a really strong pipeline in Asia markets for opportunities around, yeah, digital media, data, and also sort of promoting for partners in the region. We remain very positive about our Asian acquisition and are looking forward to a really strong growth going into FY 2027 and beyond in both revenue and profit. I'll throw over to Steve to talk through the outlook going forward.
Excellent. Thanks, Tim. The business is still positioned excellently for global expansion and product growth. The global expansion is very well underway now with operations across U.S., U.K., Europe, Asia, and emerging territories. It's something we're, you know, working very hard on, and obviously, the investment in capabilities from platform to personnel, skills, and experience within the business will yield results across our global expansion ambition. Accelerating growth through our BetBridge product. This is obviously the newest product within the Racing and Sports enterprise, but takes advantage of all of our assets, everything from our trading capabilities, digital media content, and UX/UI. This product is sort of a culmination of all of those things to enable operators to come on board quickly and rapidly onto the Racing and Sports ecosystem.
We're very excited about that going forward into the future. There's strong commercial momentum around the Managed Trading Service that we've really established ourselves as a credible and desirable operator, whether it be for our operator-managed service or our Managed Trading Service, depending on which modality the customer wants to operate. It's really being sought after now across all the features, functionality, and information that's available to our customers in those spaces. And obviously, as Tim's just touched on, Asia and Hong Kong are obviously continuing to grow and evolve. As we continue to invest, you know, in those markets, we'll see more returns and more opportunities that come from those. Again, very exciting.
You know, the range of expenditure initiatives that we've put in place over the first half, you know, will continue to yield results, across the second half of FY 2026. You know, to ensure cost discipline, you know, within the business, making sure we're making the right, you know, the right bets for, you know, for the business growth and also to create shareholder value. Again, something we're gonna be taking, you know, a very keen eye on going forward. With that, I'll hand back to Ben to get into questions.
Thank you, Stephen and Tim. Just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please do so via the Q&A button on the screen there. Stephen, a question for you. This person noticed you sold some shares recently, following the issuance of shares under the company's LTI plan. Could you please provide some color on this?
Sure thing. Thanks, Ben. The shares were disposed under the company's LTI plan, and no other shares were actually disposed of. This was done to manage tax liability. All executives and myself within Racing and Sports remain highly committed to the growth and the direction of the company.
All right. Thank you. Next question. Is the LeoVegas deal potentially as big as the Stake contract?
Look, the LeoVegas deal has the capacity to be, you know, as big. It's a, you know, it's an excellent group. It's a large group of customers, and certainly they've been operating at, you know, at a very, you know, efficient run rate in their current business, and we believe we can enhance that and scale that through the quality of our products and services and digital assets. Yeah, absolutely, it's a customer we're all very excited about, and we can't wait for them to get live.
I might just add to that as well, Stephen. I think important to note that the Stake deal was delivered with Racebook HQ as a trading partner, we did pay away a lot of the revenue for the Stake deal to Racebook HQ. With the LeoVegas deal, it's delivered fully by Racing and Sports, we'll retain basically all of that revenue. From a bottom line perspective, we feel that that will be likely equal to or greater than the impact of the loss of the Stake deal once it gets to run rate.
Thank you.
Right. Thank you. Next question: Do you foresee additional increases in cost from this point, or should we see additional operating leverage come through?
It has been a period of significant investment in the first half of the year. Some of that will flow through to the second half. We are, as Steve said, in the last tile of the outlook, focused on looking for measures to, I guess, find efficiencies. There's a number of projects in train already which we think will put downward pressure on costs. We think that will moderate in the back half of FY26, and the growth rate should slow significantly going forward in future periods.
All right. Thank you, Tim. I sort of had a similar question here. You will obviously need to continue investing in the team and product, but is that expansion undertaken in the first half largely done?
Look, like I said, it'll slow in the second half of the year, but we do think we're through the bulk of the investment uplift in expenditure. You know, as I said, we'll continue to invest in the business because it's important that we have, you know, the best products available to drive growth in the business. We're also mindful of balancing that with a range of efficiency initiatives as well, which will moderate that growth rate.
All right. Thank you, Tim. It sounds as though your investment in Hong Kong has really fast-tracked the development in this business. Do you see an opportunity to take a similar style acquisition model throughout other areas of Asia?
Look, I think, you know, the RAS Asia business, the Hong Kong acquisition, gave us a real beachhead in the region. We think that gives us good access to, you know, I guess, Singapore or Malaysia, and other areas. We probably also feel that, you know, it is a high-value region with lots of growth opportunities ahead. We remain open and proactive around other opportunities. You know, Japan particularly is another really high-value market for racing. We do see the region as a major growth driver. We're open to both organic and inorganic growth strategies there. We do feel like we've got a great beachhead, and that presents a lot of value and a lot of growth in the medium to long term.
Thank you, Tim. This one's got a few parts to it. Momentum in the business looks good, but can you talk through how you fund the business while it continues to scale? Comment here on additionally, annualized cash burn for the half of over AUD 2 million doesn't leave a lot of headroom. Are you expecting an inflection point in cash flow after recent acquisitions and new contract wins? How close is the business to achieving meaningful operating leverage and earnings growth? Should we expect continued reinvestment to restrain earnings growth for some time yet?
Yes, there's a few elements to that question. Look, I think we certainly did see, you know, I guess the impact of investments on cash in the first half of the year. As I mentioned a number of times through the presentation, there's a little bit more seasonality that's been introduced to the business, so we probably expect H 2 to be a stronger result than H 1. I think that's noteworthy in terms of the cash burn rate. It's not appropriate just to double what you saw in the first half. We think we've got, you know, I guess, a good base of working capital. We do need to continue to invest. We're open to strategic opportunities.
Yeah, if the right strategic opportunity comes, we'll look to, you know, consider our capital management considerations as part of that. Yeah, we're comfortable with where we're at at the moment, but as I said, we are looking for strategic opportunities to grow. You know, we'll package capital into that decision, you know, if, as and when that opportunity arises. Yeah.
All right. Thank you. Just a question that's probably tough to answer, but obviously, that's going to be skewed in the second half. Could you please provide a rough guide on revenue differences from Hong Kong in each half, given seasonality?
Look, you know, we've probably done about 40% of the race meetings in the first half of the year, okay? You know, that's 60% of the Hong Kong race meetings in the second half of the year from our international simulcast product. We didn't really kick that off until late in Q1. I'd expect that to be stronger in the back half of the year. I think, you know, probably on a ratio basis, that gives you a bit of an indication of what the split might be. Although noting that international product didn't come on board until late Q1, and, you know, hopefully there'll be some other initiatives late in FY 2026 and certainly into FY 2027. That gives you a bit of a flavor.
Thank you, Tim. That concludes the Q&A segment of the webinar. I'll now hand back to Stephen for closing remarks.
Well, thanks, Ben. Thank you, everyone, for joining the half presentation for Racing and Sports. As you can see, there's been a lot of activity in the first half of the year, particularly around our investment and investment for growth and scale. But also, yeah, bring on new customers, releasing new products, and, you know, managing the pipeline and opportunities through to, yeah, through to contract opportunities. We see a lot of great momentum within the business as it stands today across all regions, the U.K., Asia, Australia, and obviously emerging opportunities around partnerships and into the U.S. I guess stay tuned for the next six months, and we look forward to speaking with you at the full year and probably sometime in between. Thanks very much.