Morning. We've got a little video there which shows something of how our colleagues, across the businesses that make up The Rank Group, deliver fun, excitement, and incentives to our customers. I mean, you're going to see a lot of numbers this morning, as always, but ultimately giving funds to our customers is actually what this wonderful business is all about. Right. Morning, everybody. I'm John O'Reilly. I'm Rank Group CEO and delighted to welcome you to our results presentation for the year to the 30th of June, 2025. Many thanks for taking the time to join us here this morning, and thanks to you for those joining online. All very welcome. Joined by Richard Harris, Rank Group CFO, who will take you through the details of the full year results in a moment.
By way of a brief overview, it's been another really good year of very solid progression for the group. We've delivered growth across all of our businesses. We now have that inflection point of the casino legislative reforms to look forward to. The reforms, which I think represent the most significant change for the U.K. casino sector since the 1968 Gaming Act, are something that we are really looking forward to. These are the headlines for the year to June 2025. Like-for-like net gaming revenue was up 11% over the prior year, £795.3 million. Underlying like-for-like operating profit was £63.7 million, and that's up 38% on 2024 and slightly ahead of our expectations at this point in our progression. The group's underlying like-for-like operating margin was 8%, up from 6.5% last year.
We're making really good progress in terms of the return on capital employed, and we were up 4.2 percentage points in the year to 14.5%. Grosvenor Casinos delivered average weekly NGR of £7.3 million, and that was up 14% on the year and above the £7 million that we'd been targeting. We got there a bit faster than we expected, so very pleased with that. Mecca had another year of improving performance with revenues up 5%. Enracha continued its strong performance with revenues growing 9% in the year. Good performance across the venues businesses. In digital, revenue grew by 10% in the year with very strong growth matched to cross-channel brands. Grosvenor Casinos growing by 22% and Mecca Bingo growing by 11%. The land-based casino reforms are on the statute book.
We expect to be rolling out around 850 machines this financial year and commencing that process in just a few days' time, all being well. I'll say a bit more about that as we go on. With the strong momentum across the group, the board has set a final dividend of £0.0195 per share, taking the full year dividends to £0.026. In the round, it's been another good year for the group. Performance continues to improve, and it reflects the strategy we have in place, the priorities we've set, and I think the high quality of execution of our key initiatives. I'd like to thank all of my colleagues across the group for the hard yards and lots of skill and talent that they put in over recent years to ensure that Rank is making really strong progress, building profitability and cash flows, and increasing returns for our shareholders.
Here's Richard to take you through the details of the numbers.
Thanks, John. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to take you through the group results, a little bit more detail on the business unit performance, and then spend a bit of time focusing on CapEx, return on investment, and cash flow. Starting with the key drivers of the profit improvement in the first in the year, revenue growth of 11% contributes to almost £50 million of additional profit after deducting all the direct costs. That's partially offset by higher employment costs of £26 million, which have grown 11% on the prior year. That's due to the higher national minimum wage, one quarter's impact of higher employer national insurance contributions, some selected investments in headcount, and some additional costs associated with colleague incentives. Looking forward to 2025-2026 on employment costs, we're expecting a further increase of 6%- 7%. That's largely driven by the same factors.
Depreciation costs were higher in the year due to the capital investments we're making in the business. Overall operating profit is up, and that's 38%. Net free cash flow in the period was £27.7 million. Within that, capital expenditure was £58.5 million within our guided range of £55 million- £60 million. It's up on the prior year as we've started the investment to capitalize on the casino reforms and also we've taken the refurbishment of the VIC . There's a net working capital inflow of £10.9 million. Around half of that improvement is sustainable improvement for the medium term, and half is temporary in nature. We expect that half to reverse in the first half of 2025-2026. In the table on the right-hand side, you can see how the net free cash flow has converted through into a closing net cash balance of £45.4 million.
There's £3.8 million consideration received on the disposal of the non-proprietary business, on which a further £3.7 million is due over the next few years. We restarted the dividends last year and included in from dividends for this year, total dividends paid was £7 million. Including lease liabilities, net debt was £130.8 million. Within this, lease liabilities have increased by £23 million in the period. Lease liabilities are the multiple of lease payments and are sitting at 4.4x . That's because we've extended the leases on a number of strategic properties in Grosvenor that will come at the end of our lease term. There are still a handful more leases in negotiation. As a reminder, we expect the medium-term position to be in the range of 4.5x- 5x annual lease payments. We've now entered the higher capital investment phase with spend in the year of £58.5 million.
We've made significant progress with the maintenance and infrastructure backlog over the last two years. Whilst there's still some work to be done in the year ahead, the venues estates are now in much better shape. In Grosvenor, we completed the refurbishment of the Leicester Casino at the start of the financial year, invested in the refurb at the VIC , upgraded electronic terminals and table equipment, and prepared a number of venues to capitalize on the opportunity from the casino reforms. In Mecca, a large proportion of the spend was related to maintenance and infrastructure. We also made selected investments to improve gaming machine areas, improve external signage, and further investments to modernize the proposition. The growth investments are all delivering strong return on investment. I'll bring that to life shortly.
Total spend on the proprietary digital platforms was £9.3 million, with the vast majority of the spend being capitalized headcount. This year, we reported the group's return on capital employed for the first time. We've entered a higher capital investment phase. This is the mechanism by which we will hold ourselves to account and demonstrate the returns that we're delivering. It's something we already monitor internally at both the project level and at the group level as part of our capital allocation framework. As you can see, ROCE has improved relatively materially over the last couple of years to 14.5%. We've got clear hurdle rates in place. We are going to prioritize those investments that present the clearest growth opportunities where the competitive potential in local markets is the highest and the investments that allow us to quickly assess the impact of the casino reforms.
Moving into the business unit detail for last year, Grosvenor venues grew net gaming revenue by 14%. That was a bit ahead of our expectations. Table gaming revenues grew 18% as a result of the investments we've made in product and table management. Electronic gaming grew 21%. I'll touch on that more in a moment. Gaming machine revenues were up 8%. That's ahead of the visits growth but with supply limited and unable to fully meet the customer demand. Geographically, the rest of the U.K. grew strongly at 17%. The total growth for London was 9%. Excluding the VIC, the other venues in London grew 21%. Employment costs were the main headwinds, growing £14.1 million in the year. Taking all of that revenue growth and employment costs into account, like-for-like operating profit was up 35% to £32 million.
When combined with the excellent colleague engagement scores at 8.4, improving customer NPS, and the casino reforms, there's much to be optimistic about within Grosvenor. I thought I'd take a little bit of time just to illustrate the return on investments we've seen so far with some brief examples. This one, electronic roulette, accounts for around 15% of Grosvenor revenues. In comparison to table-based roulette, it offers the customer a number of benefits. You've got independence from other players, a private game that is uninterrupted. We've got stake size of the customer's choosing, with minimum stakes much lower than those on tables. The opportunity to win progressive prizes, including Going for Goals, one of our side games, and all that available 24/7 in all of our casinos. Over the last 12 months, we've removed poorer quality, older terminals, some of which have been in our venues for over 10 years.
We replaced these machines with new, high-quality terminals that are already proven elsewhere in our estate. The in-year investment was £7.8 million in 545 machines. We haven't changed the total number of terminals at around 1,350. The customer benefits of the changes include high-quality, consistent customer experience, much improved user interface, which is more intuitive and with better imagery and content. We've been able to introduce new games, including Baccarat. It all sounds relatively simple, but the investment is delivering great financial returns. Stakes are up 39% on the new terminals compared to those that they replaced. NGR on the terminals is up 42% from the period that they were launched. The return on investment has been 45%, which indicates a payback of just over two years. Overall, this was a significant contribution to the total growth of 21%.
Having grown the digital business by 12% in 2023-2024, we've grown by a further 10% in 2024-2025. That's despite the introduction of maximum slot staking limits online from the beginning of April. Both of the cross-channel brands have grown by a double-digit percentage, with Grosvenor performance being particularly strong. We launched new Grosvenor and Mecca apps early last year. The penetration of app revenues has increased from 13%- 30%. The Spanish digital business had a tougher period with revenues flat. In addition to the maximum slot staking limits, the new statutory levy also took effect from April 1, 2023. We now pay 1.1% of GGY, up from 0.1% previously. The combined impact of these two gambling app review measures was a negative £1.9 million in Q4, and they have an annualized impact of around £8 million. Despite this, like-for-like operating profit grew 41% to £33.3 million.
At the capital markets event we held in December 2023, we set out a target to deliver 500 basis points of margin improvement in digital in the medium term, which we then subsequently increased to 600 basis points on a like-for-like basis. You can see here that we've grown margins from 6.5%- 14.1% in that time. Of the increase, 1.3% relates to the disposals of both the non-proprietary business and Passion Gaming. The rebate starting point was 7.8% and then subsequently increased to 14.1%. That's the combined effect of the operating leverage that comes from the double-digit growth rate over two years, plus the operating model enhancements that we've made in that time. Looking forward, we see a 12-month period where margins will level off, impacted by the statutory levy and the dilutive impacts of the maximum slot staking limits.
In addition, there will be a non-like-for-like impact from the launch of YoBingo in Portugal. From 2026-2027 onwards, we see further room for improvement, benefiting from the planned revenue growth. Moving to land-based bingo, in recent years, we've seen a significant rationalization of the Mecca estate, a process that's continued this year with two further venue closures, bringing our estate size to around 50 clubs. We now have a more competitive business with clubs that offer stronger prize boards due to higher liquidity. Revenue growth was 5%, all driven by an increase in the spend ahead. Mainstage bingo revenues were down 1% off the back of investments we've made in additional prize money, key for the health of the business in the medium term. Gaming machine revenues grew by 9% and now account for 41% of overall Mecca revenues.
As with Grosvenor, the largest cost in Mecca is employment costs, and they were up £2.7 million in the year due to the impact of the national living wage and employer's national insurance contributions. Like-for-like operating profit was down marginally to £3.4 million. It's largely driven by that higher employment costs. In Spain, there was further revenue and profit growth from our estate of nine well-invested flagship Enracha venues. Revenue was up 9%, an acceleration on the growth seen in the first half. Within this, venue visits were up 3% and spend ahead was up 6%. In the first half, we completed the refurbishment of our Seville venue. That saw 4% growth in visits and 14% growth in revenue since launch. Our broader investment in product, service, and the environment has seen gaming machine revenues in Enracha grow 9%. Overall, underlying like-for-like operating profit grew 15% to €10.8 million.
That's another year of record profitability for Enracha. Over the past three years, we've made selected low-cost investments to improve the gaming machine areas in our bingo clubs. In Mecca, we've called it Project Jackpot. Gaming machine areas present a significant opportunity in Mecca but have been historically underinvested due to the primary focus on bingo. 25 venues have seen a total investment of around £5.3 million. That's approximately £200,000 per venue. We've actioned 15 of these investments over the course of the last year. We've refurbished the gaming machine areas, improved the layouts, enhanced the lighting, and introduced better audio quality. Venues that received the investment are delivering 14% higher staking than other venues, and NGR is up 13%. It's delivering a return on investment of 65%, so paying back in around 1.5 years.
Given the success of these investments and the need to further modernize the proposition, we've also invested in the gaming machines themselves. 850 Equinox cabinets from Light & Wonder were rolled out, replacing much older Clarity machines. A further 664 new machines from a mix of suppliers were also introduced across the whole estate. Looking forward on CapEx, as I mentioned, we're now in a phase of elevated investment. We expect the base level of capital expenditure throughout the plan to be in the range of £25 million- £30 million. This covers investment in maintenance, infrastructure, and the ongoing development of our digital platforms. In FY 2026 and FY 2027, total CapEx is expected to be £60 million per annum, with £30 million of growth CapEx in venues, which includes the investment to take advantage of the casino reforms alongside further refurbishment and work in Grosvenor.
A normalized capital expenditure of £50 million is expected thereof, of it improved, roughly equivalent to a ROCE of at least 35%. We first presented this slide at the Digital Capital Markets event in November 2023. It shows the cash generation we expect to deliver over the medium term. In the first stage of the plan, we were expecting to be broadly cash flow neutral. In fact, we've done much better than that due to the disciplined capital investment, improved profitability, and improved working capital. The combined impact has delivered net free cash flow of £55 million over two years. We've got two further years where CapEx will be at those elevated levels. With continued improvements in profitability off the back of the investments we're making, we expect another two years of good cash generation.
Thereafter, when CapEx is normalized and we see material benefits from the casino reforms, plus ongoing growth in digital, we expect cash generation to improve even further. With that, I'll hand you back to John.
Thanks, Richard. Right. Strategic update and outlook, a bit about what's coming next. It's these four key areas of focus which we believe deliver our pathway to operating profits of £100+ million . Not new news, sustained growth in the Grosvenor business, accelerating our digital growth, maximizing cash in our land-based bingo businesses, and of course, the key reforms from the land-based casino and bingo sectors in the government's review of gambling legislation and regulation in the U.K. That's all underpinned by investment in technology, a very strong group-wide focus on safer gambling, and a focus on our people and a culture of ensuring we always deliver great service, excitement, and entertainment for our customers, which is the business that we're in.
In terms of sustained growth in the Grosvenor Casinos business, we've got a clear line of sight to an average net gaming revenue per week of over £8 million before the revenue benefit of more gaming machines. It's all depending this year. At some point, hopefully, electronic payments, also promised in the government's gambling app review. The key initiatives which are driving the growth include the investment we've been making in the quality of the gaming products. That's tables, roulette wheels, the table gaming management system, all importantly, electronic gaming terminals. You've seen that this morning and so on. We continue to invest in poker. A couple of weeks ago, we concluded the 2025 Goliath, which is the biggest poker tournament outside of Vegas, with another record entry this year and a prize pool of over £2 million. One lucky winner walked away with £316,000. Maybe not so lucky.
We're continuing to invest in the quality of our facilities. The VIC casino, which is very much our flagship and which we all colloquially call the VIC, has seen a £15 million refurbishment. We started works last October. We completed the refurbishment just a few weeks ago. We inevitably delivered quite a lot of disruption to customers during much of the year. Revenues fell just £120,000 per week during the works. That's a huge credit to all the team at the VIC. Customer reaction to the refurbished venue has been amazing. We expect the VIC to make considerable contributions towards a step up to £8 million per week. Our approach to investment during the latter half of FY 2024 and during 2025 has been to ready some of our more important, and competitively significant casinos for the land-based reforms. Richard mentioned Grosvenor Leicester.
That was under refurbishment as we entered the year, and we completed it during half one. It provides a pretty good case study. It's in a strong competitive location in the city, hadn't had any investment for well over 10 years. We fully modernized it, and in doing so, prepared it for the casino reforms, which will enable it to host 80 gaming machines. Refurbishing also creates a sports book, well, today a sports viewing lounge. Hopefully, in a week or two, it will become a sports book taking bets, as soon as we get the all-clear from the local authority. Visits have grown 10% since the refurbishment year- on- year. NGR has grown 19%. The investment was £4 million, and we expect a payback within 30 months based upon the current performance. That's before the impact of 80 machines rather than 20 machines.
Every time I go to Leicester, all the customers want to talk about is, "When are we going to get more machines?" There we are. We've also readied a further seven Grosvenor casinos in 2024-2025 for the maximum allowable number of gaming machines given their floor space. More investments will be made over the next two years as we learn about the reforms. We're in the hospitality business, obviously, and the relationship between our colleagues and our customers is absolutely central to Grosvenor's success. We've been running a cultural program called Like From Like To Love, and it continues to gain traction across the group. It's benefiting our customer NPS scores and our employee engagement levels, with record engagement scores for Grosvenor Casinos in our most recent employee opinion survey. We're very pleased with that. It's a fabulous business.
We're the leading operator with 50 of the 111 casinos currently trading in the U.K. We've got the benefit of what is now only an emerging, seamless cross-channel experience. We've got a strong management team in situ. We've got a culture focused on service, excitement, entertainment, and very importantly, the protections we deliver to our customers. The estate was underinvested, but we're gradually dealing with that. Now we have the long-awaited land-based reforms, and this is what we expect to happen in regards to the reforms. In 2024-2025, the Grosvenor estate of 50 casinos had an average of 1,367 gaming machines, generating revenue of £102 million. The casino reforms enable higher machine allocations for casinos and licenses under the 1968 Gaming Act. Forty-nine of our 50 casinos became law on July 1, with a coming into force date of July 22.
The reforms apply to England and Wales, not to Scotland. Legislation would need to be implemented by the Scottish Parliament, and that is not currently on the horizon. The legislation requires casinos to submit variation applications to the relevant local authority. We submitted 38 applications on the first available date, which was 22nd of July. We have five casinos in Scotland. There are three casinos in England which are too small to receive additional gaming machines. We have four casinos in England where we would need development works before we could add any level of additional machines. Hence, 38 applications were made on the first available day. The process at the local authorities takes 28 days. We are hoping to be turning on our first additional gaming machines for customers around the middle of next week. Fingers crossed.
Thereafter, we expect to be rolling out just over 850 gaming machines through this financial year, the majority of which we expect to be introduced during H1. Subject to development, which includes structural works in our casinos to change physical layout to create more space, we expect to roll out a further 650 machines over the next 30 months. That makes an additional 1,500 machines in total, which is an increase on the current estate of 110%. We have said in the past that we expect to get to an increase of 130% over time. That is still the case, but it will require the legislation to be passed in Scotland plus additional development in the shape of extensions and relocations. As I always say, not everyone who bets on sport plays in a casino, but just about every casino player also bets on sport.
We have acquired, purchased 356 sports betting terminals and expect to complete the installations across 38 casinos in line with the gaming machine installations. We will experiment with proper fully-fledged sports books in a few of our casinos, starting with Leicester and Luton. Think of it as a very nice betting shop with great service and food, food and beverage. Space is clearly a constraint to do it everywhere right across the estate. We intend offering sports betting wherever we possibly can as we think it will give existing customers more reasons to visit and broaden the appeal of casinos to a wider audience of consumers. Our digital business is on a journey towards delivering an increasingly rich and seamless cross-channel experience for our customers.
The scale of the business has been gradually increasing since the acquisition of the YoBingo business in Spain in 2018 and Stride Gaming in the U.K. in 2019. We set an expectation of growing revenue by 8%-1 2% compound average growth over the medium term. We've got a strong pipeline of developments to deliver that going forward. We've been modernizing the core platform to ensure we can develop, test, and deploy new functionality, features, and products at speed. In this respect, we've got an important roadmap of developments ahead of us this year, including a new bonus engine, a new wallet, and a new operator interface, which actually went live this week for the teams running our online services in real time.
In the next couple of months, we'll be merging Mecca's venue-based apps—we've got a couple of those—with our core Mecca Bingo app to deliver one single app experience for Mecca customers across both venues and digital. In Q3, we will launch a single membership for Mecca customers so that as a customer of a Mecca brand, you're recognized regardless of channel. We're staying in the footprint of cross-channel games within both Mecca and Grosvenor. We've launched something called Mega Money, which is a Friday night joint liquidity game, which is called in venue and streamed online, and more live at Grosvenor table gaming opportunities from our bricks and mortar venues. When our digital business grew 12% in the year to June in Spain, we were flat. That followed several years of really strong growth.
The challenge in Spain has been the core bingo platform, which has lacked the capacity, the scalability to grow concurrent customer numbers during peak trading periods. We've been working on a new bingo platform. We are going to launch that in the next few weeks. That provides much greater scale, bigger pools, and therefore bigger prizes. It's a critical development in getting the YoBingo business back into the double-digit growth rate that we've seen over recent years. We're confident by the end of half one, the business will be back in growth. A little drum roll for the next part. We've now successfully completed the homologation process in Portugal, with a regulator giving our platform the all-clear for launch. We're now in the process of getting ready for a soft launch in the coming days, really, as we gear up for a full customer launch later this half.
We'll be the first online bingo operator in Portugal. The digital business is now a material business. It's got strong management talent, good technology, is making a significant contribution to our overall profitability and cash flows. There's considerable further upside to be delivered as we build out that seamless and tailored cross-channel experience for our customers. Our approach to the bingo business right now is to maximize cash over the short to medium term. That said, as you've heard, we've been making some investments where we're seeing rapid returns. In addition to some further investments to machine areas and external deco and signage this year, we have a couple of investment trials of outdoor terraces and cashless interval games. We've been scaling electronic bingo.
We're pushing that even further this year with an ambitious goal to take the share of bingo revenue played on tablets well beyond last year's 76% figure. In terms of the reforms, we've been awaiting the reforms in the gambling app review that were proposed for bingo, including the much-needed change to the 80/20 rule, which provides just about the opposite mix of category B3 and C machines that are preferred by our customers. We've also been waiting for a broadening of what constitutes bingo to enable side bets on the mainstage game, which provides customers with more chances to win. Those changes have been delayed, as the government reviews the licensing regime for traditional bingo venues. We're hopeful that we'll see this reform at some point during this financial year. Bingo very much needs help.
It's recognized too by the government, and it needs help if it's been tested to be kind of sustained at today's levels across the country. Mecca is super well-positioned for these reforms. 50 venues with increasingly strong prize boards giving great value to customers, registering amazingly high customer net promoter scores and delivered by a highly engaged team of Mecca colleagues. In Spain, we continue to improve what is a terrific Enracha business. Two further venue investments this year, one nearly already nearing completion at a venue in Sabadell in Catalonia. We believe the path we're on, the progress we've already made, and the runway of opportunity we've got before us creates a compelling investment case for the group. We've got market-leading positions in attractive markets. We've got the biggest brands in the land-based bingo and casino markets. We've got the benefit of strong cross-channel customer economics.
In Grosvenor, a casino business with a licensing requirement creates a high barrier to entry. We've got an attractive customer proposition as a result of the renewal investment we've been making across our venues businesses, a complete renewal of our digital business on acquired and now increasingly modernized proprietary technology, and with a very strong roadmap of investment opportunities, particularly this year with the legislative reforms for casinos in the U.K. A highly engaged and skilled workforce. Group-wide record engagement scores this year of 8.3 out of 10, not surprising, delivering market-leading customer net promoter scores. With considerable investment going into further enhancing the culture within our business, and with very clear growth drivers, clear pathway to £8 million net gaming revenue per week in Grosvenor. That's before the land-based reforms.
An expected 8%- 12% compound average growth rate in digital, and the anticipated continued growth in a now well-set Mecca and a well-polished Enracha estate in Spain. Plus a 62% increase in gaming machine numbers in Grosvenor this year, with that extended to a 110% increase by the end of 2027 calendar year. We're targeting investment to maximize shareholder value, capital allocation policy with clear hurdle rates for capital investment and a progressive dividend policy. We think all of that inevitably is delivering and will continue to deliver strong financial outcomes. Double-digit revenue growth with growth in all businesses and strong profit conversion. We're on track to deliver £100+ million operating profit in the medium term. Cash generation is ahead of expectations, and it will continue to improve as operating profit grows and capital investment normalizes. Strong payback on investments. We're growing the return on capital employed.
A strong balance sheet with a net cash position and with significant further opportunities for the group. In our view, that's probably the most important of all. There is a lot more to come. Very briefly on current trading, good momentum within the group continued into the early part of this year. We're six weeks in, and NGR is growing at 9% over those six weeks. Pleased with that, and we're well placed to meet expectations in the year. We will be holding a capital markets day event at the newly refurbished VIC on London's Edgware Road on the morning of Wednesday, the 22nd of October. We had planned to hold it during the summer, but we thought we'd just delay it, hold it back until we've got some early insights into the casino reforms.
That is all I wanted to say to questions. We're going to take questions from the room first, I think. If you've got a question, please raise it, and we're going to have a mic to you. If you could say your name so that, I mean, everybody knows Ivor, but if you could say your name so that those joining online know who the question is from. Then what we're going to do, if you've got questions online, please type them into the Q&A box, and we'll pick up any questions that are asked online if we haven't covered them in the room, I think is the format we're going to operate to.
Thank you, John. Ivar James from Peel Hunt. Three things. Mecca, what are the prospects? Talk about cash maximization. You spent nearly £10 million on CapEx last year. When do we see the payback? Same thing really about Portugal. It's been in the background for so long. I kind of forgot what the prospects are. What's the market? What's Rank's opportunity to get Yo into that market? Is that material? Should I even be asking that question? On Grosvenor, how can we talk about the unsatisfied demand? You've already delivered really strong double-digit revenue growth. Would it have been more without the VIC casino being disrupted this year? Is that existing customers spending more? Where's the next leg of revenue growth going to come from? Is it more people being converted to being casino customers? How should we think about that upside opportunity? Thank you.
Do you want to start with the rest of the Mecca paper?
Yeah. The Mecca business is not cash positive at the moment. We're investing now because we believe that is the best route to cash maximization in the medium term. We'll continue to invest over the course of the next few years. The investments we're making are relatively low-cost individual projects. On average, kind of £150,000 investment into our clubs, a little bit more in the gaming machine areas. That's delivering rapid paybacks, as you've seen from the slide earlier, 65% still on capital employed. My expectation over the next two to three years is we can get that business back into cash positive territory. That's the kind of timeframe that we're looking at. That will coincide with double-digit operating profit in Mecca. That's a reasonable ambition to have. It's a bit harder than when we originally set that target because employment costs have increased dramatically.
That is the largest cost within the Mecca business. It's gone back a little bit from where we originally anticipated. The business is growing nicely. The only way we're going to get there is to continue to grow the top line. Hence why we need the investment.
Richard, thank you. Mecca's a really important community asset too. We've been forced to close a lot of Mecca venues. We really don't want to close any more. Keeping them open is all important to us because these, as I say, they're really important community assets. Portugal, we've waited a long time, haven't we, to get to this point where we're going to go live. It's a very fair question. What do we expect? Year one, we expect startup. We will be incurring losses in the first year as we build a brand in Portugal inevitably. Portugal's quite a strong bingo country, but there's no bingo online operator. There are now 18 licensees in Portugal. We're the nineteenth, when we receive our license in the coming days, hopefully. We'll be the nineteenth. We'll be the only operator offering bingo in that market.
There's quite a bit of consumer education to be done. I remember that in Spain in the very early days, having launched the first sportsbook in Spain many, many, many moons ago. I remember it very well. It takes a bit of time for the consumer to recognize and understand the game. We think we'll build the liquidity fairly quickly and be able to deliver strong prizes to the consumer very quickly in Portugal. Excited about the opportunity. We'll incur some startup losses this year, in truth. Will it be material in the next couple of years? We hope it will be a significant enough part of the international digital business to make it worth its while. We'd like to then think from there. We're looking at some other territories, other jurisdictions for the Yo brand. Grosvenor, there is definitely unsatisfied demand. I know this from my travels.
Everywhere I go up and down the country, customers ask me one question. When can we have more machines? I was in a casino in the Northeast a few weeks ago where we actually only open at midday. I was back of house talking to colleagues. When I came out front of house, the casino had opened. It was 12:12 P.M. and 12 of the 20 machines are being used. It was 12:12 P.M. The casino had only been open 20 minutes. That is the extent of unsatisfied demand. Undoubtedly, the machine reforms, much needed, will satisfy more demand and will broaden the audience of people because gaming machines, kind of anybody could be. Everybody can. Everybody wants to. People like to play gaming machines. It will definitely deliver unsatisfied demand.
In terms of the move from now 7.3- 8, I think that's about just giving better entertainment, with a stronger product offering in nicer facilities to customers. It's a stronger proposition. It's a stronger offering than we've had in the Grosvenor business for many years. The customers are responding with their feet, coming more often and enjoying the experience that we deliver for them. I think there's a good way more to go.
Thank you. It 's Richard Stuber from Deutsche Bank. Please, kind of three questions as well. The first one is, lots of speculation about potential tax hikes in the autumn statement. Could you tell us what sort of you're hearing, what your expectations are? And particularly, I guess you mentioned that bingo needs seem to be recognized by the government. Are there any other sort of sacred parts of gambling which you think won't be touched? That's my first question. The second question is, obviously, you're putting all these new machines in. As you said, so some eyebrow there. There's definitely some demand for them. Are you doing anything proactively to sort of highlight the new opportunity, the new machines' opportunity so you can ramp up the utilization more quickly? The final question is the £100 million EBIT target. Now you have a bit more visibility around land-based reforms.
How quickly do you think you can get to that £100 million number? Thank you. I'm definitely going to let Richard answer the first one or the last one of those three because I'll give you the wrong answer, Richard. I'll be far more optimistic. Let me start with a tax point. There is lots of coverage for tax, as we all know, over recent weeks, particularly recent days. The way I describe our business is, we entertain millions of people, which is wonderful. We employ a huge number of people. We employ 7,800 people across The Rank Group Plc, which for a company with the relative size of profitability, that's an enormous number of people that we employ. We pay a lot of tax. I mean, they're the three things that this group does. We pay an awful lot of tax.
If I look at the profit after-tax number for the year just gone of £44.6 million, in the year, Rank Group paid £189 million in taxes. That's corporate, gaming tax, and employer and national insurance. I've included local taxes in that number, so business rates and the like, but taxes that we pay. In a sense, for every £5 we generate, we're paying £4 in rough simple maths. We're paying £4 in tax. That's what we are. We employ a lot of people. We entertain a lot of people. We pay a lot of tax. That's the business we're in. You can see in those mathematics that the margins for tax movement are not that significant. I don't moan about, by the way, the taxes that we pay. That's the business that we're in. That's the business that we've always been in.
I'm not moaning about the tax rates we pay, but I think the margins for tax increases are not very significant. To really run the risk of moving companies that are profitable to being unprofitable, and unprofitable businesses don't last. That creates less competition in the market, and less competition means a worse deal for the consumer. I think that is well recognized by the Treasury, by the way. I think you've got to kind of separate the views of some think tanks, which were the same views of those think tanks before last year's budget and maybe even the year before. You've got to separate that from actually what the Treasury is doing. What the Treasury is doing is consulting on remote gambling taxes. There are three remote gambling taxes. They're proposing to simplify them into one remote betting and gaming duty rather than the three taxes you know.
We've put a full submission into the Treasury and wait and see what the outcome is. Our preference would be, from a group perspective, clearly I prefer for the status quo to prevail. For the online taxes not to be harmonized into one tax would be my strong preference. Why? Because actually, I'll say that. From a materiality point of view, we're not a very big sports operator. We've launched a new sports book, by the way, in the last week, which is fabulous. You should all take a look. Leaving that aside, it's not a material part of the group. If, and let's assume Treasury were to go down the road of delivering one online tax rate, one online tax and one online tax rate, we've got to assume it will harmonize up to 21% rather than down to 15%, which is the current rate for sports betting.
If that were to happen, then the materiality for the group for the year commencing April 2026 would be about £1 million in operating profit. Not that material given that sports is not a terribly significant part of our offering today, but we'd like to compete more effectively in sports over time. It's clearly what we'd like to do, and the higher the tax rate goes, the more difficult it is for anybody to compete with the very, very large players in the market. That impacts the consumer ultimately. That was such a long answer. I can't remember what the next one was.
Incentivize machines.
Incentivize machines. We will be running quite a lot of activity inevitably to advise customers that the machine offer in Grosvenor Casinos has changed. It will be done locally. Lots of CRM activity inevitably, so we've got a campaign program lined up. We will turn the machine on and it will work. However, my view is I turn the marketing machine on and no doubt it will work. I think it will work anyway. I think that the consumers have long recognized that there's not insufficient choice for them on gaming machines in casinos. Once there is more choice, they will quickly recognize it. I think supply will better meet demand going forward. That's all important, and stop me being optimistic about when we get to £100+ million .
I think the great thing is we've had two years' worth of good profit improvement. The fantastic thing from our perspective is that we've seen lots of financial and strategic headway over the course of the next few years, obviously supported by the casino reforms. I think we give quite a lot of guidance around our kind of future prospects. I'm probably not going to give you an exact timing, because there's lots of information we give you so that you have one piece where you can fill in the gaps yourself. The analysts that have updated for the machine reforms think they've got us in at making around £100 million as a consensus by FY 2028.
Oh, sorry. There we are.
Thank you. Morning. I've got the questions. One on current trading. Could you maybe sort of update on where we are with, yeah, the performance of London at the start of the year given the relaunch or completion of the refurb of the VIC casino? Secondly, very encouraging to see that app penetration in the cross-channel brands has gone from 13%- 30%. Can you maybe sort of give any steer on where you see KPIs between app users and non-app users?
Okay. Thank you, Greg. Sorry. Beg your pardon. Thank you for the questions. A bit mixed actually on the app numbers. We are slowly kind of better understanding it, I think, because it's still a pretty new world. We're not pushing the apps as hard as we might. The Grosvenor app is generating higher spend per customer on app from mobile web and desktop actually. For Grosvenor, clearly, significant upside benefit. Not quite seeing the same coming through for Mecca. We are trying to better understand why that is the case. A bit of it is margin related, and some big wins have an impact on it. Not quite the same dynamic with Mecca. We are just kind of understanding that a little bit more. We've got more consumer research going on currently.
We just kind of understand that before we press the accelerator on encouraging more mobile web users to transfer across to the Mecca app. Slowly but surely, we're sort of understanding that. Really pleased with where we are. I mean, our old apps were not good enough. Our new apps built in-house on proprietary technology are so much better than the outsourced apps we've offered in previous years. It's taken us a while to get there. The first thing was to bring proprietary technology in-house. Now very much focused on the strengths of those apps and the move, the Mecca move to having one app for both venues and our digital business. I mean, I talked about it briefly earlier. You can see the materiality when all of our venues' customers use the app. It's what they use to get vouchers and promotions.
They use it to buy food and beverage within the venue. They use it to order tickets, to order a Max Tableau on our big money weekends to make sure that they've got a Max Tableau when they come and play. They're used to using the app that we offer. What we're doing is bringing that together with meccabingo.com to one single app for all customers. We think that will be quite a material breakthrough in terms of creating that cross-channel experience for the customer. So much current trading. We're really pleased with the 9%. It's a good start to the year. London, I think London is like one week behind this summer from last summer. I can't explain why it is. If I look at the metrics and I look, we look every week at who's visiting and who's not. We see the visit numbers.
We see the drop numbers, by nationality actually, week in, week out. It feels like it's just one week behind last year. I don't really know why. Last year, Paris Olympics, maybe a few more customers using London as their base last year than is the case this year. Can't really explain it. London's pretty positive, nonetheless. The VIC is very positive. We're just a few weeks in, but we're very excited about the prospects for the VIC. As the summer picks up now as we get through this month, I think the VIC is going to be super busy. It has been in the first few weeks of opening. One swallow, all that doesn't make a summer. A few more weeks to go under the bridge before we celebrate too much. Customer reaction to the new VIC is extraordinary.
I thought we got the old VIC and the new VIC. I have to say there was a lot of drama in between. Anyway, there we are. I forgot any more questions. Yeah.
There are two questions online, both of which from David Bruhan of Goodbody. The first question reads, how should we think about the cannibalization risk of electronic gaming and table gaming from the rollout of new gaming machines? The second question, can you please give a sense on per-machine revenue expectations from the new sports betting terminals or how significant the opportunity of sports may be?
I don't see there being a terribly material substitution from new gaming machines, relative to electronic table gaming. I don't think that's that significant. They are largely speaking, not entirely, but largely speaking, different players. They appeal to a slightly different audience in truth. I don't think there clearly will be an element of substitution from machine revenues from other products given that if I walk into a casino tonight and I've got money in my pocket and I want to play and there isn't a gaming machine available for me to play on, then I might well put my money somewhere else. That's just an inevitability. I don't think they are directly substitutional other than in that regard. I don't think it will be that material. We'll find out in the fullness of time. The sports betting, we just don't know.
I'd like to know, but we don't know today. We are seeing in we've got one venue, which is Luton, which offers sports betting. It's an improving offering to the consumer. It's getting better. It's getting stronger week by week, and we're learning a lot as we go. I would say we've now got it to a point where it's a very good betting shop. Like, I'm thinking now in the economics of a licensed betting office. We've now got a very good betting shop at Luton. I'd like it to be better than just a very good betting shop. We're not quite there yet. We've got further to go. We will learn a lot more when we've got sports in a larger range of outlets, a larger range of casinos than just Grosvenor, Luton. We've made a good start there. I'm pleased with the numbers.
Thank you, John. There are no further questions online.
Great. If there's nothing further, I'm going to draw a sum. Many thanks for coming this morning. It's lovely to see everybody. Thanks to everybody joining us online. Capital Markets Day event, 22nd of October. I think we're going to start at 10:00 A.M. Hopefully, by then, we'll have some proper numbers to talk to you about, about the performance of new machines across the estate, which we're very excited about. Many thanks again.