The Rank Group Plc (RNK) Q4 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning all. Thank you to every joining online and a warm welcome to everyone that's here with us today. It is of course my first set of results as Chief Executive and I'm grateful to our board, our major shareholder for their support and for this opportunity. Rank is a great business and I'm delighted to share with you the story of another year of strong performance. To set out in a bit more detail how I see the opportunities for the group and why I think we're really well positioned for future success. I'm also delighted to be joined for the first time by Cliff Basie, our interim CFO. I'm gonna start with the key highlights for the year before handing over to Cliff for the financial review. So once again, there was strong revenue and underlying profit growth in the year. It was great to see all businesses contributing to improvement and that's despite some headwinds. During the year, we took decisive action to mitigate the impact of higher RGD on our UK digital-facing business. And the performance in digital was therefore encouraging at plus 12% in Q4, particularly given the material reductions in above-the-line marketing. We started the new financial year in a similar fashion, so that's pleasing to. From August of 2025, we started to increase the number of gaming machines in Grosvenor, and as planned we increased machine numbers by 65% before Christmas with any modest in-year capital expenditure. The momentum is building with the initial step up in performance continuing to improve through the year and strengthening further in the early weeks of the new financial year. The trajectory is positive and provides a strong platform on which to build. but it requires further optimisation before we need to make any further capital investment. So the focus is on maxim...