Summary from Goldman Sachs available in full on Commsec:
We review Aristocrat’s 2018 investor day held on Tuesday, May 1 in the Sydney head office. As highlighted in our preview, the day’s presentations focused on the digital business, providing greater detail on the strategic rationale behind recent Big Fish and Plarium acquisitions, with particular focus on the opportunities greater scale and digital first capabilities provides it when looking to grow its businesses across Strategy/RPG/Casual (SRC) game (c.US$22bn addressable market) and social casino segments (US$4bn social casino market1). In addition, the company provided a strategy update concerning the core land based business, with particular focus on adjacencies across Outright Sale: Class III Stepper, Class III Other as well as Gaming Operations: Class II Video, Class III Stepper. There was no trading update or earnings guidance provided in respect of full year NPAT (GSe: +30.7% to A$711mn) nor was there any change in respect of general guidance provided at their February AGM for “continued growth in the 2018 fiscal year” . The next major event for the stock will be their 1H18 result, scheduled for May, 24, 2018.
We highlight below key takeaways across the group’s digital and core businesses. Overall the investor day provided a number of qualitative explanations concerning strategy that should help address investor concerns regarding the strategic rationale behind recent acquisitions and outline the potential for the further growth on offer given the size of the U.S land based casino / mobile games market. However there was less concrete detail from a quantitative sense in respect of the path this growth looks like, i.e. fee per day vs. unit adds, user growth relative to monetisation growth, new games vs existing, social casino vs. other genres. ‘Balanced approach’ was an often cited explanation in response to questions designed to elicit such detail. Notwithstanding this lack of precise detail (which in many instances is likely to be sensitive in ALL ’s competitive environment) we are of the view that Aristocrat clearly demonstrated they are continuing to take a measured approach building on the key factors behind the development of successful game franchises, namely a focus on product, talent and innovation. ALL screens attractive trading on a 20x FY19 P/E relative to growth on offer (FY17 to FY20E EPS CAGR: 23%) compared to ANZ gaming peers trading on 17 .5x with 8%. We retain our Buy rating (CL), with the stock showing 14% upside to our A$30.70 12-month target price.
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