Slot machine and lottery company Scientific Games reported its fourth quarter and full-year earnings today.
Company: Scientific Games Corp. (NASDAQ: SGMS)
Revenue: $737 million in the fourth quarter, up 30.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2014. For the full year, the company reported $2.76 billion in total revenue, up 54.4 percent from the year before.
Scientific Games completed its $5.1 billion merger with Bally Technologies Inc. in November 2014.
Loss: $127.5 million in the fourth quarter, compared to a net loss of $47.1 million during the same time period one year earlier. For the full year, Scientific Games reported a net loss of $1.39 billion, compared to a net loss of $234.3 million in 2014.
The company said in a statement that for both the quarter and the full year, it felt the impact of “unusual pre-tax charges” that included noncash goodwill impairment charges and other costs. The pre-tax charges totaled $137 million in the fourth quarter and $1.27 billion for the full year.
Loss per share: $1.48 in the fourth quarter, compared to a loss of 55 cents per share in the fourth quarter of 2014. For the full year, Scientific Games reported a loss of $16.23 per share, compared to a loss of $2.77 per share one year earlier.
What it means: The company said its fourth quarter revenue was also up 10 percent compared to the third quarter of 2015, driven by strong gaming unit shipments and a boost in revenue from its interactive segment.
At the company’s gaming segment, which includes much of the results from Bally, revenue jumped from $301.7 in the fourth quarter of 2014 to $469 million in the fourth quarter last year. That’s because the fourth quarter of 2014 only included 40 days of Bally results, according to Scientific Games. On a more comparable basis, gaming revenue increased 7 percent year over year.
In the lottery segment at Scientific Games, meanwhile, fourth quarter revenue fell 6.1 percent to $207.7 million, a decline that included $6 million in “unfavorable foreign currency impact,” the company said. Revenue from product sales also fell $11.7 million because of lower international hardware sales and services revenue fell $3.1 billion largely due to the “cessation of a provincial contract in China” that resulted in lower international service revenue, according to the company statement.
At the same time, fourth quarter interactive revenue rose 40.2 percent to $60.3 million. That reflected a 28 percent boost in daily active users of the company’s social gaming products, as well as a 56 percent boost in real money interactive gaming.
Scientific Games CEO Gavin Isaacs said in the statement that 2015 was a “transformational year” for his company. Having completed the “heavy lifting of integration” with Bally, Scientific Games implemented $231 million of annualized cost savings, Isaacs said.
The company also said it cut its total debt by $33 million in the fourth quarter.