RAS Technology Holdings Limited (RTH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning and welcome to Racing and Sports Investor Webinar to discuss the company's FY '26 results. Presenting today will be CEO and Managing Director, Stephen Crispe; and CFO, Tim Olive;, who will be going through the presentation released this morning on the ASX. [Operator Instructions] I'll now hand it over to Stephen.

Wonderful. Thanks very much, Ben, and thank you, everyone, for joining the RAS Technology Holdings Full Year FY '26 Results Presentation. And just to recap on who Racing and Sports is. We're a global data content, trading, wagering, digital media and publications business servicing the wagering industries on a global basis. We have the world's largest racing database with unrivaled depth across all codes globally and this contains over 5.5 billion data elements. We serve well over 30 countries. We have full localizations into 7-plus languages and more to come. We've been doing this for over 20 years and the pedigree within the business is extremely strong. And we process up to over 1,500 daily events 24/7 365 days of the year. We are trusted by some of the world's leading brands as you can see on the bottom of your screen there; across Entain, Betfair, Tabcorp, Sportsbet, just newly LeoVegas out of the U.K., Bet365 globally, Playbook Engineering, the Hong Kong Jockey Club and Stakemate; just to name a few of the leading global brands that put their trust and faith in Racing and Sports to deliver their services every day of the year. So a snapshot of FY '26. It has been a big year for Racing and Sports. There's been a lot of activity and we are continuing to build on the momentum out of previous financial years and going in also to FY '27. Proudly, we have completed the racing -- our complete racing solution has gone from strength to strength. It has been part of the core investment thesis where we've made significant investments in really uplifting and continuing to make that product absolutely best-in-class and that's across our operated managed trading platform as well as our managed trading services. We've also pleasingly launched our Betbridge product, which is a fully embedded rapidly deployable solution for sportsbooks and casino platforms that don't have racing capabilities and they can get that product up and running within a matter of weeks. As said, we've made significant investments across the business, across tech and operations and also leveraging AI and automation to really drive these investments and get the best-in-class products in market, but also the best-in-class methodologies and practices to continue on this thesis of automation and scale. And pleasingly, RAS Asia 1 year on in our first full year of ownership of the Asian business has been very successful delivering publication products to audiences in Hong Kong, but also further afield as well. Our simulcast products have been well received domestically within the market and also working with RAS holders around the world to help promote their racing into Hong Kong. And we've continued our trajectory in the U.K. with several key commercial wins, one of those being the LeoVegas Group and our launched Betbridge product with Stakemate and Fairplay. And also the editorial and digital reach has been strengthened. So Racing and Sports now reaches over 6 million unique viewers globally and that's a great achievement across Asia, across our digital platforms, our social media platforms; which continues to grow as we continue to push investment into that part of the business, which is becoming now more and more important. So with that, I'll hand over to Tim Olive, our CFO, to talk to the 2026 financial highlights.

Thanks, Stephen, and good morning, everyone. Great to have you on our results call this morning. I'll talk through some of the financial highlights from FY '26 starting with some of our key metrics as shown on this slide. So revenue for FY '26 was $28.4 million, was up 34% on the prior year and pleasingly accelerated on revenue from the first half of the year. It's great to be able to say that this is our fifth straight year of 30-plus percent revenue growth showing that we're a high growth company with lots of runway ahead. From a profit metric: our normalized EBITDA, which was adjusted for nonrecurring abnormal items, was $3 million, up slightly on last year and that's despite the major investment that we've made in the business across this year. From an ARR perspective, revenue was $23.5 million, up 8% on the prior year with the majority of the high value LeoVegas contract revenue still not included. In regards to cash, cash finished the year at $4.2 million remaining relatively stable in the second half of the year, which reflects that improving operating result and profitability. Our normalized cash flow from operations was an inflow of $2.7 million, down slightly on last year, which really reflects the major investments that were made in the business to support growth. This slide shows you a summary of trends of our key financial metrics over the last 5 years. Revenue has continued its strong growth trend supported by our investments in trading in Asia. Our ARR has continued its year-on-year growth at $23.5 million and, as I said, it doesn't include most of the LeoVegas revenue at this stage. Our profit metrics: normalized EBITDA, as I said, was $3 million, up slightly on last year and our normalized net profit result before tax was a profit of $84,000. The investments made in the business and the broader strategy that is being executed are expected to improve operating leverage and net results from FY '27 onwards and we're looking forward to that. Okay. Zooming into our business units. It's really pleasing that all 3 business verticals continued to grow both ARR and revenue in FY '26, a great momentum there. Enhanced Information Services ARR grew by 7% underpinned by continued growth in existing key contracts in Australia and the U.K. For Wagering Technology, ARR was up 5% year-on-year. However, the underlying trend is stronger than it appears as it reflects the removal of the high revenue Stake deal, which concluded in May. And I guess offsetting that, there's been a range of new wagering tech deals in the U.K., Australia more broadly and the deals we had already are also continuing to grow in value. So the underlying trend there is really quite strong and we see that as a real strong growth area going forward. Moving over to Digital Publications, Media and Other. It reported ARR of $2.4 million for the end of financial year, which was up 26% on the prior year. RAS Asia business is continuing to build momentum and our new agreement with the Mauritius Turf Club is starting to mature and is very much exceeding expectations. Moving down to the bottom of the slide where you can see the geographic composition of the business. The U.K. and Australia are continuing to grow strongly while there has been a small growth in the other category due to the conclusion of the Stake agreement. So some really strong results there. I'll throw it back to Steve to talk about some of the investments in the business. Thanks, Steve.

Wonderful and thanks so much, Tim. Some excellent results there for the team. And look, this slide is a really important one. It speaks to the investments we've made over the past year and how they now equate to providing operating leverage within the business. And so I'll do this quickly from left to right. So there's a strong thesis around building a more scalable platform, utilizing the best-in-class learnings around AI, automation, and harmonization of those 2 things brought together with all the Racing and Sports key assets such as our global enhanced racing database and other technologies, proprietary technologies within the business. So that now spans across our trading technology, our overall platform architectures within the business, growing and growth within Asia obviously growing our trading capabilities and more core technology investments across the enterprise as we continue to scale the business into different geographies and obviously enhancing the technology platforms within our verticals. So the enhancement by AI started over 12 months ago and this year we're starting to see some real gains achieved through the enhancement and the investment in AI technologies within the business. So we've developed efficiencies and automation across the technology parts of the business around development, around testing, around quality assurance and release, insights into data, greater insights than we've been able to achieve before with legacy technologies. We've been able to produce innovation at speed internally within the business, but also for our customers. Faster deployment for our customers, which means faster time to market, which means revenue coming in the door quicker. We've been able to use AI and automation across our corporate operations within the business. That means taking costs out, making people's jobs more efficient, allowing them to do more with their time. And we've also enhanced our risk governance and compliance using AI technologies as well. So this allows us to deliver more. This allows us to accelerate our entry into new markets and be more competitive quicker. It allows us to reduce costs to deliver these services to our customers and also internally within the business. It allows us to grow without the spike in our cost base using these new technologies, whether it be personnel, technologies, hosting fees and the like and also delivering more value to our customers faster and our shareholders of course. These are the most important tenets and this is why we've made those investments over the past 12 months to really accelerate this journey for Racing and Sports to take on more quicker, faster, better. So as a global business update, we've had a number of significant updates throughout the year. One of those has been of course enhancing the long-standing relationship we've had with Tabcorp, which now reaches back to well over a decade in totality, where we've signed a new 4-year term for the data and content and fast form services which we provide to Tabcorp and they're a great partner of ours. We've extended our Playbook Engineering agreement to December FY '28 -- calendar year '28 rather. And there's also additional strong demand for that platform with additional brands to go live in Q2 and beyond. We've also signed a 5-year extension to our TABtouch agreement, again great partners over there in the West, for racing data and content and also with an expansion of services for visual form products as well into that customer space. We've secured contracts with numerous MTS and trading partners and trading customers, including Stakemate, Altenar and Fairplay, which we've touched on already. And Racing and Sports Asia continues to grow with multiple new agreements around marketing, advertising, promotion and other really interesting innovative products we're launching into that part of the world, which will be exposed in due course in future announcements. And also pleasingly, our Racing and Sports Wagering 360 white label platform for new bookmaker entrants into the Australian market. We've signed our first external brand, Laserbet, and that continues to grow with increased interest, which is exciting for everyone. With that, I'll hand back to Tim to talk us through the U.K. market.

Thanks, Stephen. Look, our U.K. business continues to be a major success story for RAS. ARR is continuing to grow strongly and with a lot of upside still to come from the LeoVegas deal and other deals which are still growing. This trend is expected to continue. Our well-established deal now with Playbook Engineering continues to grow and we've added a new platform partner in Altenar with 3 brands launched already and more to come. With the Playbook Engineering deal, we've also extended that for another couple of years, which is pleasing and shows the confidence in the Racing and Sports offering. Looking forward, LeoVegas' main U.K. brands went live in August. The launch has gone really well and we expect to see strong growth across the next few quarters and for that to sort of establish at a strong level going forward. Our other trading deals are still in a growth phase and we expect to see continued growth from that going forward as well. Moving across to Asia. It's been a year of strengthening foundations for our RAS Asia business. Revenue from the first full year was $4.5 million. We also undertook significant initiatives to automate and also to optimize our supplier arrangements and that's helped us to increase our gross margins from 35% to 40% and hopefully more to come there. We've introduced a new international simulcast product, which is a completely new revenue stream for the business, to support international RAS holders to promote their racing in Hong Kong and that's been very well received and launched earlier than expected and has been really well subscribed to by international RAS holders. We've also launched a series of digital assets and put a really strong focus on this in Asia to recognize that we need to have a multichannel strategy to support RAS holders to promote their racing in the region and that's been really successful and the traffic on those websites has been really strong. And as Steve said before, our global audience is now 6 million people, which is really exciting. Looking forward in Asia, racing will soon launch in Mainland China from October '26, which the possibilities could be very significant there in time. We've got a growing footprint across Asia with strong growth expected in Singapore and Malaysia as we establish our networks there and really give RAS partners an opportunity to really promote across that broader Southeast Asian region. We see good revenue growth that can come off the back of that. And with the international simulcast product, the Hong Kong Jockey Club have committed to grow the number of meetings they import and promote from a whirlpool perspective. So as well as the take-up and the value we're providing there, there will be an underlying unitary growth driver there as well. So really good growth momentum in our Asian business. I'll throw it back to Steve to talk to the outlook for the business. Thanks.

Thanks, Tim. And look, really, just to recap on what you've heard today. Obviously the investment in AI and automation remains one of our central priorities. Having done the heavy lifting, however, to this point, there will continue to be iterative and incremental investments made as required to continue to drive innovation, obviously support that scalability and efficiency thesis to allow faster development, faster deployment and faster realization of revenues for our clients and ultimately, Racing and Sports as a business. The core technology investments that we've made really have supported the build-out of our full proprietary racing solution and data content, media and digital solutions, which really work together in harmony. And all these parts of the business provide a strong basis for us to go and attack opportunities on a global basis, whether they be in Asia, whether they be in the U.K., Europe, Latin America or the U.S.A. or North American markets. We're continuing to leverage the products that we've been building for the U.K. market specifically. And obviously with our dedicated team on the ground there, we have a team of great sales, business leaders and trading capability now within the U.K. domestically and that is really starting to bear fruit and has been for several years. We get to sweat the assets that we've built hard over there given that we've now got the best-in-class trading and MTS and data and content assets we believe for that European and U.K. market. And we still continue to place significant emphasis on Hong Kong and Asia. Obviously the investment in that part of the world was very deliberate and very targeted to allow us to get a foothold in what is a very difficult and tricky market to penetrate. We've done that successfully. We have a great local Asian team running the business under Ronnie Tay and he's been spearheading not only the uplift in our technology and capabilities within that part of the world, but also the design and go-to-market with our new digital assets that Tim has touched on, our simulcast products and obviously looking at our trading investments and expanding that part of the business into that addressable market as time goes on. So what's next? We're going to be progressing our cost-out initiatives of the business and really focusing on AI and automation, looking at optimizing how we do business in our suppliers, our technology platforms. We've already started that journey, which is yielding and bearing fruit as we stand today and will continue to go into the future. We've been restructuring the business to gain efficiencies, put people into more meaningful roles for their skills as we continue to use AI, automation and those technologies to take some of the [ mandroic ] tasks away. So this is all to reduce delivery costs, increase margins, increase productivity and obviously returns to customers and shareholders alike. So with that, let's throw to questions. I'll hand back to Ben.

[Operator Instructions] I have a couple of questions regarding the proposed Tabcorp's proposed acquisition of BetMakers. So I'll tie them together. So the first one is what, if any, impact do you anticipate the proposed acquisition to have on Racing and Sports? And the other question was have you seen an increase in inbound inquiries from customers of competing platforms since the proposed acquisition was announced?

Wonderful. Thank you for the question. It's a very interesting one. So Racing and Sports has had, as I said before, a long relationship with Tabcorp delivering quality premium services to them in our data and content, our fast form and international services. And this has been something we've been doing for a lot of years. It's high quality. It's best-in-class as evidenced by all the Tier 1 operators within the Australian market obviously using Racing and Sports as a global independent and trusted partner of data and content of tips and other services. In terms of going forward, is there opportunities for Racing and Sports? Have we seen inbound? Yes, we certainly had a lot of inbound inquiries and there's been a lot of discussion around the transaction. I won't get into the details of that, but I'll leave it for others. However, Racing and Sports is obviously being a global independent provider of all the services, which I've just covered in the presentation deck, you naturally see that there would be inbound inquiries for us for various things, but I'll leave it at that.