Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Star Entertainment Group Limited FY 2024 results and update. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation, followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Steve McCann, Group CEO, subject to regulatory approvals. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, and thank you for saying the subject to regulatory approval piece, because I do need to state that I'm the incoming CEO Managing Director. Don't yet have probity approval, so that will need to be forthcoming before I'm in a position to make decisions that bind the company. I'm here in an observer capacity, but I will be leading the discussion. I'm here with Neale O'Connell, the CFO and acting CEO. So thank you for joining us. What I was planning to do was quickly flick through the shareholder deck that's been put on the ASX. I won't dwell on a lot of the detail, but I'll move through it relatively quickly, and then take questions.
Just to begin, and in context which you're aware of, The Star went into trading halt on 30th of August, and we were suspended from trading on the 2nd of September. Yesterday evening, we announced to the ASX details of the new debt facility agreements that have been put in place, and following that announcement, and then lodgement of the Appendix 4E today, together with the investor presentation and results release announcement, we expect to come out of suspension and resume trading tomorrow, so the debt package that we've put in place has given us some short-term liquidity runway to enable us to get to this stage, so I'm on page five of the presentation.
As you can see, the statutory EBITDA for Star was AUD 175 million for the year FY 2024, down 45% on FY 2023, broadly consistent with previous guidance. That's the EBITDA, sorry. The statutory loss was AUD 1.69 billion, which included AUD 1.4 billion of impairments and other significant items. The impairment arose through us revisiting our asset values following the deterioration in current trading conditions, and that's coupled with earnings impact that we anticipate through the introduction of various other upcoming regulatory changes, including the transition to mandatory carded play and reduced cash limits. So the total impairments were AUD 337 million for Sydney, AUD 274 million for the Gold Coast, and AUD 819 million for Brisbane, which includes the investment in DBC, the joint venture.
We have a brief trading update. The performance of the business has continued to deteriorate over the course of FY 2024, the second half being materially worse than the first half, and that deterioration has continued in to the commencement of this financial year. So EBITDA was for the second half AUD 61 million, down 46% on the first half, and it declined from a monthly run rate of AUD 19 million between July 2023 and January 2024, to AUD 4.6 million in the last five months. It was negative in July, but that was impacted by technology outages, and it was again a small negative in August of AUD 1.1 million. F ollowing the closure of Treasury Brisbane and the impacts of the transition towards carded play, we have seen some further deterioration in group EBITDA in the first part of September.
So the key drivers, I think you're aware of a number of these issues, but revenue has been substantially impacted due to a more challenging consumer environment, and the impact of changed business practices. But also, we've lost market share through a combination of reasons, including those changes, but also including business initiatives, where clearly we are at a tough period at Star, and we need to re-energize our revenue management and targeting of rebuilding market share. Operating expenses are elevated, and they do continue to increase. Part of that reason is the remediation and the transformation activities. We've increased our resources also across risks, across controls, and across safer gaming. So some of those increased costs will become BAU costs.
The remediation costs themselves, which we've got some detail in this pack, are AUD 360 million, of which about 50% has been spent to date. The transition to mandatory carded play and cash limits commenced on 19 August 2024 in Sydney, and that was over the premium gaming floor, premium gaming rooms and some small part of the main gaming floor. It will be through the entire gaming floor by 19th October this year, and then we'll be transitioning to lower cash limits by this time next year. The first four weeks of trading since the introduction of mandatory carded play saw revenue down 10.7% compared to the four weeks prior. So it's early days. We don't have a lot of data there, but that is broadly in line with expectations at the moment.
In Queensland, legislation was introduced in March. The timing of implementation of mandatory carded play and mandatory pre-commitments and cash limits is subject to finalization, and we're currently engaged with the Queensland regulators in relation to this. Turning to page six, The Star Two report was publicly released on the thirtieth of August. The Star was served a show cause notice on thirteen September, and we are scheduled to respond to that tomorrow, and that response will cover the issues raised by The Star Two report. It will also include our submission on the revised remediation plan, which we have already finalized, and we have submitted to the Attorney General in Queensland for approval, and we've provided a copy to the NICC in Sydney already.
That will form part of our submission tomorrow, as will some information around our financial position and financial outlook, which will be part of the next review in terms of our ongoing suitability. The Star Brisbane opened on the 29th of August. It's a staged opening. We have opened some parts of the F&B offering as well as the gaming floor. We've opened The Star Grand Hotel. We haven't yet completed the Rosewood and the Dorsett hotels, and there are parts of the common area that are still not completed, and there are a range of other food and beverage offerings yet to be brought to market. So, there's a fair way to go before we get to full capacity utilization.
Our initial stage of gaming and F&B revenues are substantially higher than Treasury Brisbane, as you would expect, but we no longer generate EBITDA from Treasury Brisbane. That license has now been surrendered, and we'll earn an operator fee and be entitled to a 50% share of the net earnings of The Star Brisbane, after the operating fee. That total income will be equity accounted, so you won't see the revenue line coming through the accounts anymore. It'll be the equity accounted contribution from The Star Brisbane. One of the significant issues, which we've provided a lot of information in this pack on, so that you can get a full picture of where we're headed, is the DBC joint venture and the remaining equity contributions required to be made by The Star. They have been revised upwards.
There was AUD 75 million paid in FY 2024. There's a further AUD 358 million estimated to be required to fund the cost to complete, and in addition, we expect to make further equity contributions to fund costs associated with financing of the debt facility and operations during the ramp-up phase. We do think there'll be some negative operating costs for a period of time before we get to full utilization. On liquidity, as at 31 August, Star had an available cash balance of AUD 130 million. Now, just to be clear, historically, we've talked about cash in one line, but I just wanna be clear that this is the available cash to us.
The actual composition is AUD 212 million of cash, less AUD 30 million of cash that's restricted in our facilities, guarantees, for example, and AUD 52 million of cage cash, so I don't think we've broken that out previously, but just to show that, part of that cash is inaccessible, so AUD 130 is the actual available balance. We have sourced additional liquidity from our existing lenders, and that's been set out in the ASX announcement released yesterday, and I'll talk about that, in a little bit more detail in a moment. On the remediation program, I mentioned that we are working on getting, a revised plan to be, endorsed by the manager and by the regulators, so that plan's already been prepared.
There's a number of milestones that we will be committing to, and our objective will be to demonstrate to the regulators that if we are able to achieve those milestones, that that will demonstrate that we're on the pathway to suitability and ultimately, the restoration of probably conditional licenses in the first instance, but then fully unconditional licenses once we've finalized our, our remediation plan and been deemed suitable. So there's a lot of work to be done in that, but we are very focused on driving that outcome. On page seven, talk about a range of initiatives in response to the current environment. We need to turn the business around. We obviously need to arrest the current situation of a negative EBITDA, and get back to a profitable operating environment. Part of that will need to be a cost-out initiative, corporate costs.
Increased in FY 2024 to AUD 301 million. That's about 40% higher than what they were in FY 2022, and they were AUD 215 million in FY 2022. In addition to that, the operating expenses have increased from an average of AUD 91 million per month in the first half of 2024 to AUD 99 million, recorded in July. So we're clearly running an inflated cost level. We need to work hard on getting that under control. We've identified over AUD 100 million of annualized cost savings that we are pursuing. The intention, we've already started on this, and the intention is for that benefit to be delivered by March, or to the work to be completed by March 2025, and the run rate to be adjusting from then. There is further work being undertaken to identify additional cost savings.
I think some of that will be readily achievable. We do still have high external consulting spend, for example, but there are other components which will be more challenging, and there's work to be done for us to implement the second round of cost out in FY 2026. On the CapEx side, we have reduced maintenance CapEx relative to historical levels, to AUD 80 million. There has been a lot of money spent, obviously, on Queen's Wharf. There's been money spent in Sydney on the premium gaming floors and perhaps overcapitalized in a lot of areas. So we think we can pull back a bit on CapEx in the short term. We already have been on an asset sale program, so the sale of Sheraton Grand Mirage was recognized during the period.
We have announced recently the sale of the Treasury Casino building to Griffith University. We've also identified about AUD 300 million of additional assets that can be sold, which includes the remaining two buildings at Treasury, and there are a range of other assets that we consider to be non-core, and we believe are readily saleable, subject to getting the necessary approvals, which I have no reason to believe wouldn't be forthcoming. In terms of balance sheet support, our lenders have executed a commitment letter for a new debt facility, and that debt facility is up to AUD 200 million in two tranches. That becomes available for drawdown once we have achieved a range of conditions precedent, and we've executed long-form documentation.
Once that's done, the existing immediately from here, the existing AUD 450 million facility will be reduced to AUD 334 million, so that's fully drawn. Lenders have provided immediate waivers for the testing date, 30 September, and they'll provide also for 31 December, with the 31 December waiver being subject to the long-form docs. The new facilities at the two tranches are AUD 100 million each, so we're expecting the first tranche to be available from the end of October through to 20 December this year. We'll be continuing to consider additional avenues to further support our liquidity position, and we'll also be looking at other capital sources, including subordinated debt. That's something that you would expect us to be at in the coming months, pursuing.
So in the rest of the pack, there is quite a bit of detail. We have taken the view that given our current situation, it's very important for our shareholder base to have a fulsome set of information, which hopefully addresses most of the questions that you would have. But I'm sure there will be others. It's a big pack, so most of you wouldn't have had the chance to absorb some of this information properly. So happy to take questions in a moment, but also happy to circle back with other questions as they become apparent. I will just go to a few of the pages in the pack. Perhaps the first page to turn to is page...
So between from the financial overview through, this is really the information from FY 2024, which accords to the summary, broadly in line with previous disclosures. I think where people probably are more focused is what happens from here. I'm gonna go to page 16, which is the point that I made about our operating expense base. As you can see, the monthly average has trended up to AUD 97 million a month in June 2024. And we have the operating expenses as a percentage of revenue have grown materially. 59% back in FY 2023, up to 75% today. We need to work very hard at driving cost out of this business, recognizing that we also need to create an environment here where we've got a motivated team, and we're focused on success.
I think there is room for doing both. I think we've had a tough time for some time, and it's all about driving the right cultural outcome and having the support of our stakeholders to achieve our objectives, which are first and foremost, remediation, and then finding a way to, over the medium term, put some value back into the equity in this business and drive longer-term success. On, cost side of the business, we've got a breakdown on page 17. We haven't, I don't think we've historically disclosed this information, and we've usually disclosed our total operating expenses and not the group corporate charge.
You can see the costs in FY 2024 have grown to AUD 301 million, as I said earlier, and there's a range of components of those costs, and part of this is driven by the increased spend on transformation and remediation. You can see that on this slide, risk and controls have grown by AUD 60 million since FY 2022, IT by 19, Transformation Office by 12, the People and Performance team by 10, and there has been a bit of offset in other areas. So I think it's never easy to embark on a detailed cost-out program, but there are significant opportunities for us to achieve this first round of cost-out, and we'll be working hard to deliver that. I'll go now, perhaps, to page 23, trading update. Again, I have touched on this already.
You can see from this slide the continuing decline in the revenue line, across slots and domestic tables, in particular. Non-gaming has gone the other direction, which is encouraging, but still work to do on how we drive good profitability out of the non-gaming businesses, and performance has continued to decline, with operating expenses growing very materially during that period. The monthly EBITDA has declined from an average of AUD 12.6 million in the third quarter in FY 2024 to AUD 7.8 million in the fourth quarter, and then to a loss of AUD 1.1 million in August 2024. That decline has been across all properties, and it's driven obviously by the combination of the revenue line being impacted and the cost line still growing.
Turning now to page 25, just to talk a little bit about some of the revenue initiatives, and I think this is really a story of... Clearly, the competitive environment has changed dramatically, combination of tighter regulations, and I think it's important to emphasize the objective here is to eliminate financial crime and reduce problem gambling. And I think that so long as we keep focused on those objectives, the way we achieve that has to be with the best possible relationship with our regulators. It has to be with a team that's focused entirely on achieving those outcomes, which is what we will drive through the culture of this organization. There are ways to do it which are cumbersome and do have a material impact on business, and there are ways to do it which hopefully don't have a material impact on business.
And I don't think we've done it as well as we could have, and that's a combination of different reasons, including the fact that this business has been clearly on its knees, and you can see that from this presentation and the fact that we haven't been trading for a few weeks. It's a tough environment to achieve change when people are worried about their future. So we've got to reset the culture and reset the expectations. But when we do that, you can see on this page, there are a range of things that I would describe as low-hanging fruit. There are a range of other things which are a little bit harder to achieve, but with the right people, are readily achievable.
I think it's not a case of sitting here saying, "We're gonna wait until there's a level playing field at a regulatory level." We are going to be going after winning back some of our market share immediately through some of these initiatives. I think the CEOs of the three properties that we have are very confident that they can achieve a number of these things, and they're working hard to do them already. If you look at, you know, some of the things on this slide, we really haven't been cross-selling as well as we could have or should have. We don't have a loyalty program that's fit for purpose in the current environment. There are a range of marketing initiatives which we need to pursue.
There is a way to engage with our customers around the new rules and around, customer due diligence and around breaks in play, which are harming the business, and there are ways to do it, which are customer-friendly. We've got to get much better at the latter, and we're working hard on that customer experience, and I'm confident you'll see some positive results from that over time. We are also working extremely hard to demonstrate to the regulators that we are a trusted operator, and that they can rely on us to actually deliver what we commit to deliver. So that is critically important, and anyone within Star who's prepared to sign up for that journey will get all the support that they need.
Anyone who's not, well, there are other places that they probably should be, because we need to all be aligned in one direction, and that's gonna be a key message going forward. On page 26, I'm talking a little bit more here about the cost reduction initiatives. There are a few components to this. The first is a headcount reduction, but importantly, that's in group corporate, where we have built the team up quite a bit to address some of our current challenges, but there are also some opportunities. That is not the worker component of our team. People have asked already about job guarantees, for example, that does not impact our current job guarantees. We believe this is headcount reduction that we can identify and achieve.
There are other pretty standard reactions to a cost-out program in terms of hiring freezes and salary freezes, which we're working through. There's quite a bit of consultant spend in this business, and we've identified how we can get that down in stages, and we are looking at ways to optimize our marketing, procurement spend, and other customer initiatives. I will turn now to page 30. So the remediation plan, we have included a pretty detailed breakdown of the remediation spend, and that spend is a total of AUD 360 million, of which we've spent about half to date.
The balance will be over the next 2.5 year period, and that funding has been set aside in all of our discussions with our lender group, and that's a critical component of our response to the show cause notice from the regulator and in our discussions with the Queensland regulator as well. There are a number of milestones in that plan. We'll be seeking to work with the NICC here and with OLGR to agree those milestones and then present independently assured sign-off that we are achieving those milestones as we move forward, and that'll be the pathway to achieving suitability. There are other items that we've flagged on this page. I've talked about the mandatory carded play.
We also have, on page 31, a number of regulatory issues already to be resolved, which are known, but we need to do some further work, obviously, AUSTRAC being one of them. There is a proceeding set down for hearing from to June 2025. We will be working to hopefully get to a negotiated outcome before then, because that is one question that a lot of shareholders and lenders obviously have as to, you know, what is going to be the impact of the AUSTRAC penalty. On the casino duty, we have now reached agreement with Liquor & Gaming New South Wales in relation to the underpaid casino duty that's factored into our numbers. We have not agreed a penalty interest rate. That's work still to come
On the class action, there is one class action proceeding that's continuing, and we've made some allowance in our provisions in relation to the solution of all of these items on page thirty-one. Turning to The Star Brisbane, page thirty-three. As I said, we have commenced trading. We were granted our casino license at 12:01 A.M. on 29 August, and we opened the casino the next day. It's been very, very well received in Brisbane. It's an amazing asset, quite a, an extraordinary development for Brisbane, and I think that both publicly and at the government level, it's been very, very well received. It is only a soft opening, and there's quite a bit left to open.
You'll see on the slide, which I think is page 33, that we've opened on day one, as I said earlier, the gaming floor, the Star Grand, a number of our food and beverage outlets, the Sky Deck, the Event Centre, the bridge, and the public realm areas. But there's a range of other stages of opening, and by FY 2026 or calendar year 2026, expected to open the Rosewood and Dorsett hotels. On page 34, we have outlined our outstanding equity contributions, which again, I've already mentioned. There is a total of AUD 358 million of cost to complete equity contributions that Star is still to pay on Queen's Wharf. AUD 174 million of that is in FY 2025, AUD 183 million of that is in FY 2026 and beyond.
In addition to that, there is the cost of servicing the debt, and there is also the cost of any negative operating expenses prior to any ramp up. I should say on the previous page, we also did set out the fee structure for the operating contract. So as you, I think, are aware, it's a joint venture, 50% owned by The Star, 25% shared by Chow Tai Fook, and 25% by Far East. But Star is the operator, and the operating revenue is based on, and I don't think this has been shown previously, is based on 7.5% of gaming revenue, 2.5% of non-gaming revenue, 2.5% of rebate revenue, and then 18% of EBITDA after the revenue-based fees.
So that rate that Star earns before its share of EBITDA reduces by 50% once we get to AUD 85 million of fees paid in a year. So I think that's when you look at the earnings going forward. As I said earlier, it's equity accounted contribution to earnings going forward, not revenue. So I am going to go to page. Actually, I'll just quickly touch on page 41. I think this is, again, this is in the appendix, and this is, again, something that we haven't shown you before. So we've outlined the group operating expense on page 16, and they are then allocated across the properties. Historically, we've allocated 60% to The Star Brisbane, 20% to the Gold Coast, and 20% to the Treasury Brisbane.
We're showing this breakout because, obviously we're going to now be moving forward with a different component in The Star Brisbane, and the corporate allocation charge from Treasury will have to be absorbed across the group. It doesn't just disappear. We closed Treasury, but the corporate costs need to be then reallocated. It's also important to note on this page, this shows you that the property level EBITDA in FY 2024, which has obviously been a tough year, still remains materially positive, with AUD 476 million of property EBITDA before we allocate corporate costs across the group and absorb the remediation costs.
So the reason I thought we should look at this page is to make sure that we remember that these properties generate revenue, they generate positive EBITDA, and we need to work hard on getting the efficiencies through this business to ensure that some of that positive EBITDA hits the bottom line for all of our stakeholders, so I might just stop there and happy to take any questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. In the interest of time, we ask that you please limit to two questions per person. Your first question comes from Kai Erman from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hi, Steve, and hi, Neale. Thank you for taking my question. Just in regards to how you guys are doing funding at this point in time, obviously with the announcement yesterday, thinking about, you know, over FY 2025, and looking at the direction of EBITDA, given the trading update you guys provided today, could you just give some color on where you think leverage will be towards year-end in the context as well, given interest costs will be rising on the back of that, how you're thinking about additional funding required and potential equity raise to pay off debt?
So the last bit of that question, potential equity raise for. What was the last piece, sorry?
A potential equity raise to reduce gearing levels.
So look, I think the way that we're looking at things, and this is probably a reflection of where we are in the business, is we're very focused on our short-term liquidity runway, and that is what's driven our discussions with our lenders to put in place liquidity to give us some capacity to now reset the business. That liquidity under this existing debt facility, assuming we meet our conditions precedent, gives us the runway through to late calendar 2025, which would then bring us to the point just before when we're due to refinance Queen's Wharf. So that is our focus for now. We're obtaining covenant relief from our lenders as part of this package. We don't have, in our plan, currently anything other than the 150 sub-debt raise, which is a condition precedent to draw down of Tranche Two.
So that sub-debt can take any form. It could have equity component associated with that, but that is yet to be worked through. Our intention is over the next few months to be testing appetite for a sub-debt piece of that sort of quantum, to enable us to then move to draw down phase two. We then have a number of things to achieve beyond that, which include obviously the remediation progress, but also resolving AUSTRAC and being in a position to be able to explain to shareholders how we're going to resolve the Queen's Wharf funding challenges. So that's the way we're thinking about it, rather than a sort of net equity concept. I think it's more that short-term liquidity runway.
Awesome. Thanks for that color, Steve. And just in regards to your comment that, that liquidity gives you runway through to late calendar twenty-five, is that assuming no payments for AUSTRAC in that time period?
We've made a range of assumptions, but without getting into detail, we've made a range of assumptions as to what we think is likely, but including what we think business performance will be. There are some assumptions around cost out as well in that. So rather than getting into the detail, it's quite a detailed analysis.
Okay, perfect. I'll pass it on there. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Matt Ryan, from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Steve. I just wanted to hone in on your comments about September seeing a further decline to EBITDA and whether that was driven by MCP being rolled out to more areas, or is there sort of something else to consider?
Yeah, I think the mandatory carded play, which I might have touched on, the first four weeks, I think it was, of mandatory carded play was down 10.7% on the previous four weeks, so that, that was a direct impact of mandatory carded play. But we have also seen ongoing weakness across in the Gold Coast as well, for example, which it doesn't have mandatory carded play at this stage. So I think there's several components to that. One is the current economic environment, another is probably the state of our business and concerns around that, and the third is that the customer experience is obviously not where it should be at the moment, and our competitors are working very, very hard to take advantage of that, clearly.
It has been an ongoing tough environment, so we need to arrest that decline.
So, but just on the 11%, so I think you've said that that's only rolled out in certain areas. So can you just provide a little bit of color on how much of the floor that that's covering? I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of, you know, is the 11% going to be largely the impact of the mandatory carded play, or could the number end up being much worse than that?
So the current phase, we have mandatory carded on our premium gaming floor and a small percentage of the main gaming floor. And we have AUD 5,000 cash limit on those parts of the floor. By 19th October, we will have mandatory carded across the whole of the Sydney gaming floor with a AUD 5,000 cash limit, and then we will move to a AUD 1,000 cash limit by this time next year, by 19th August next year. So based on that, yes, there is a possibility for a further impact. We've run a range of scenarios in our modeling, and we have sought to put ourselves in a position where our liquidity can cover those scenarios. So, but there, you know, one of those scenarios is that it's worse, given that we're only in the first phase of it.
Thank you, and just with the cost out exercise that you're doing, I think there's a slide where you talk about 350 FTEs coming out of the business. If we're looking at the corporate overhead expenses, appreciate the color that you've given us in terms of breaking all of that down, which section would we expect the FTEs to come from? And can you give us a sense of how large 350 would be from those areas?
Yeah, there's a range of different areas. In some areas, it's about a third of our headcount. In other areas, it's 10%-15% of our headcount. So, yeah, sort of varies overall, but there's over 1,000 people in the corporate headcount.
Okay, and which, which areas? I mean, presumably you're not reducing risk and control, but are there specific areas within there, perhaps in IT or other areas that you think we need to be thinking most about?
Feeling like we've given you a lot more disclosure on that than people normally would, so don't really wanna get into detail. It's people's jobs we're talking about, so I just wanna be a bit careful about that.
Fair enough. Okay, I'll join the queue. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone. Your next question comes from Justin Barratt, from CLSA. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thank you very much for your time today. The first question I just had was, I noted in your financial statements that you intend to release, actually audited financial statements by the 30th of September, so in the next few days. So just wanted to try and understand why you've released this update today, ahead, only a few days ahead of the audited financial statements?
Thanks, Justin. It's Neale here. Yeah, we released the results, the unaudited results today to obviously get back to being listed. And obviously, as you saw yesterday, finalizing the debt package, there's just some final matters that auditors have got to finalize in terms of getting to an audited financial statements, which we'll be releasing on Monday. So that's the process we're going through.
Okay, no worries. And then I just wanted to understand, what other non-core assets can you just talk to the other non-core assets that you are assessing, as options for potential sales to help your liquidity position?
Yeah, we have quite a number of non-core assets. The first two, which are well known to be for sale, are the other two buildings at Treasury, so the Treasury Hotel and the Treasury car park. We're already in discussions with potential buyers of those two. We also have other assets that we consider to be non-core. They include The Darling hotels in Sydney and the Gold Coast. We've already had approaches on The Darling in Sydney. And when I describe them as non-core, what we obviously need to do is make sure if we're selling assets, they're not having a material negative impact on revenue. And we believe that there are opportunities in relation to those hotels where we can secure enough room nights for our customers as part of a transaction and still get a good outcome.
Most of our assets require regulatory approval to sell those assets, so we need to work through to get the appropriate consents. But I've had no indication that that would be prohibitive. I think that we'll get to the right outcomes on a range of assets, provided we work with our regulators and authorities, Placemaking New South Wales, for example, and work with them in a constructive way. So there are a number of others, too. There are assets like car parks that people keep looking at as non-core, but I think we need to do more work on any impact on revenue before we put those sorts of assets up for sale.
We've had approaches on things like the Event Centre in Sydney, but again, that would have to be structured in a way that we made sure we generated revenue benefits from that as well. So there's quite a bit of work to do, but we've been pretty cautious in putting out that number of 300 plus. So you can be assured there's a lot more than that in terms of non-core assets, but in terms of readily salable, that's the kind of number we think is appropriate.
Fantastic. And sorry, if I can just squeeze in one more. Just noting that in your monthly actuals, you, you've noted that there looks to be, like, a bit of a step up in August versus July for both total gross revenue and for operating expenses. It looks sort of in the range of sort of, let's just call it 5%-10%. Is that just regular, I guess, seasonality there? Or is there something else that we should be aware of?
There is some seasonality in these numbers, there always are. But I'm not sure what page you're on. Are you on page 23?
23. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, just in August, it looks like there's about a 5%-10% step up in August versus July for both revenue and OpEx, and I was just, yeah, curious to see if there's anything there that we should be aware of?
Yeah, a lot of that revenue has come through the non-gaming side of the business.
Yeah.
A couple of events that drove additional revenue-
-and expense.
And the expense side is obviously part of that as well. So, as we've said, our operating expenses do continue to grow. Sorry, Neale, did you-
Yeah, no, that, yeah, that's exactly right. The food and beverage side of the business has had increased expenses there. Yep, due to events, so.
Great. Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.