Full Transcript: Playtika Holding Q2 2026 Earnings Call

On Thursday, Playtika Holding (NASDAQ: PLTK ) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below. APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit to learn more.

The full earnings call is available at Summary Full Transcript OPERATOR Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second quarter 2026 earnings call for Playtika Holding. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session.

To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. You'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Elad Amit, Senior Vice President, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Elad Amit, SVP Corporate Finance and FP&A Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today for the second quarter 2026 earnings call for Playtika Holding. Joining me on the call today is Robert Antokol, Co-Founder, President and CEO, and Tae Lee, Chief Financial Officer.

I would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements including, but not limited to, the company's anticipated future revenue and operating performance, including the expected marketing investment activity and the impact of AI on the company's business and industry. These statements and other comments are not a guarantee of future performance, but rather are subject to risk and uncertainty, some of which are beyond our control. These forward-looking statements apply as of today and you should not rely on them as representing our view in the future. We undertake no obligation to update this statement after this call.

We have posted an accompanying slide deck to our investor relations website which contains information on forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures and we will also post our prepared remarks immediately following the call. For a more complete discussion of the risk and uncertainty, please see our filing with the SEC. As a reminder, we will not be taking questions related to the Strategic Alternative review. With that, I will now turn the call over to Robert.

Robert Antokol, Founder & CEO Good morning and thank you for joining us. I want to speak directly today. There are a few questions we know are on your mind about Playtika: Can we grow? Can we launch a new hit?

And when we invest to grow, does it last? These are the right questions to ask and today I want to answer them with results, not words. Let's start with what matters most: our business model works. When we bring players into our games, the goal is to help them stay not for a quarter but for years.

They keep playing, they keep spending long after we first bring them in. This is the heart of Playtika. It is what we have built since I started this company 16 years ago, and this quarter we clearly saw it again. Look at Disney Solitaire.

In the first quarter we increased our investment to grow this game, and you ask a fair question: What happens when you spend less? Do the players leave? How sustainable is the growth? This quarter we have a clear answer.

We brought our marketing spending down and the game still grew. This only happens when the players you have added continue to stay with you—when they keep playing and they keep spending. And this is how we ask you to judge this business. This is the right way to judge a live game over its full life: how long the players stay and how much they are worth over that lifetime.

What matters is long-term engagement—the players who stay for years. By this standard, Disney Solitaire has the potential to be one of the best games we have ever built. Our older games make the same point. Slotomania started this company 16 years ago and it is still one of the most important games we have in our portfolio—not because of its size today, but because of what it proves.

Sixteen years on, it is still here, stable performance for three quarters, and still supported by a community of players who have stayed with it for years. When a game holds its players for that long, this is not luck. This is the model working. We told you last quarter that our marketing spending would come down as the year went on.

It did. And as it came down, our margin moved up. 8% in the first quarter. D2C is another area where we did what we said.

We told you we would grow this channel and use it to protect our margins. That is exactly what we did this quarter. 3% of revenue. This channel is a key part of our future.

Let me close with this. Trust is earned. It is earned by saying what we will do and then doing it. We said the players we invest in will stay and keep spending, and this quarter they did.

We said our margin would rise, and it did. We said we would grow D2C to protect margins, and we did. This is a company that does what it says, and that is how we will keep earning your trust. With that, let me hand it over to Tae to take you through the numbers.

Thank you. Elad Amit, SVP Corporate Finance and FP&A Thank you, Robert, and good morning. In the second quarter, we saw the dynamics we described last quarter play out. Our marketing expenditures stepped down materially as the year progressed, margins increased, and SuperPlay became a positive adjusted EBITDA contributor beginning in the second quarter.

Before I walk through the numbers, I want to give you three points to keep in mind as you interpret our results and think about the rest of the year. First, the margin recovery this quarter was not an accident; it was the plan. We front-loaded user acquisition spend into the first half, and especially the first quarter, and as that spend came down in the second quarter, the profitability of the business came through. This front-loading was driven largely by our SuperPlay titles, where the structure of the earnout incentivizes concentrating investment early in the year.

The result this quarter is the operating model working as designed: invest to grow and then let the profitability follow. Second, and closely related, the cadence of our marketing spend will shape the revenue trajectory for the rest of the year. Because so much of our user acquisition spend was concentrated in the first half, we expect revenue in our SuperPlay studio to decline on a sequential basis in the second half versus the first half, even as these titles grow year over year. I want to be clear about what this is.

It is not a loss of momentum and it is not the games weakening. It is a direct result of a deliberate choice in the timing of our spend made in the context of the SuperPlay earnout. We would encourage you to judge these titles on their full-year growth and their lifetime economics, not on the movement from one quarter to the next. Third, we saw the consumer sentiment soften as the quarter went on in Q2, and we are watching it closely.

We started to observe a slowdown in the industry mid-quarter, which we attribute to weakening consumer confidence. Inflation has been a persistent pressure on the consumer this year, and we believe it weighed on discretionary spending, including in our category. We think this impacted our second quarter results, and it is a key reason we're taking a measured view of the second half, which I will come back to when we discuss guidance. With that framing, let us go through the financial results.

0% year over year. 2%. 6 million. 1% year over year.

Now let's turn to the portfolio, starting with the performance in our top three revenue titles for the quarter, Bingo Blitz, Disney Solitaire, and June's Journey. 5% year over year. The revenue decline looks steeper than last quarter, but let me explain what's driving it, because the composition here matters. The majority of the year-over-year decline is concentrated in players acquired within the last 12 months, as we moved away from acquisition channels that brought in high volumes of short-lived, incentive-driven users and toward investing in our existing long-term players, the community that's always been the foundation of this franchise.

Our long-tenured players who have been with Bingo Blitz for more than one year generate most of the game's revenue and remain the foundation of this franchise. DTC continues to support the game's economics, and Bingo Blitz remains the number one bingo title worldwide. 6% year over year. I want to spend a moment on Disney Solitaire, both on what the results tell you about the business and how you should model it for the rest of the year.

The key point is this: we grew Disney Solitaire revenue this quarter while bringing our marketing spend on the title down meaningfully from the first quarter. Growing revenue on lower acquisition spend is only possible when the players you've already brought in stay and continue to engage. Now, how to model it from here? Our user acquisition investment in Disney Solitaire is unusually front-loaded this year, more so than we would run a new title in the normal course.

This reflects the structure of the SuperPlay earnout, where the studio is incentivized to grow revenue year over year while increasing EBITDA margins. Having concentrated that investment in the first half, we are reducing Disney Solitaire spend significantly in the back half, and that step-down converts into higher EBITDA margins as the year progresses. The direct consequence is that Disney Solitaire revenue is likely to decline on a sequential basis in the second half even as it grows year over year. This is a function of the spend timing that I just described, not of the title's health or long-term potential.

Disney Solitaire is early in its life, and we believe it will continue to scale. When our investment in the game normalizes, we would expect the trajectory to reflect that. The right way to judge this game is on its full-year growth and its lifetime economics, not on the sequential movement that our spending timing creates. 1% year over year.

We continue to see strong trends in monetization driven by improvement in our events, segmentation, and campaign tools. Engagement among our long-tenure players remains at elevated levels, and this past quarter we launched a successful new IP collaboration with Agatha Christie, which was well received by the June's Journey community. June's Journey remains one of our strongest and most durable casual titles and a top revenue contributor to the portfolio. Let's turn to specific line items in our P&L.

5% year over year. Like the first quarter, the decline was primarily driven by lower platform fees resulting from the continued growth of our DTC business, partially offset by higher royalty expenses. 8% year over year. The steeper decline this quarter reflects the full-quarter benefit of the cost actions we began earlier in the year on lower headcount and reduced outsourcing expenses; the severance costs partially offset the savings in the first quarter.

This is a good example of the discipline we brought to our cost structure carrying through to the bottom line. 6 million, down 2% year over year and down 30% sequentially, reflecting the significant step-down in marketing spend we told you to expect after our front-loaded first quarter, and we expect spend to step down further in the second half. 2% year over year. The reported year-over-year increase is not meaningful on its own because the prior-year quarter included a one-time benefit from the revaluation of contingent consideration, which reduced G&A in that period.

3% year over year. There were no significant one-time items in the second quarter. 9% year over year. 1% year over year.

1% year over year. 5 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. Turning to guidance, we are maintaining our full-year revenue and adjusted EBITDA ranges. That said, based on what we see today, we expect to finish the year toward the lower end of both ranges.

There are two factors driving this. The first is deliberate and within our control. As I described, we front-loaded our marketing investment into the first half, and we're stepping that expenditure down meaningfully in the back half. That reduces revenue in the second half by design while supporting the margin expansion you saw this quarter.

The second factor is the consumer. As I noted earlier, we saw demand soften across the industry mid-quarter, which we believe reflects the pressure that persistent inflation has placed on discretionary spending. We are taking a prudent view of how that carries into the second half. Taken together, our investment cadence decision and our measured read of the consumer are the primary drivers why we expect to land toward the lower end of our ranges for the full year.

We'd be happy to take your questions. OPERATOR Thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.

To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile our Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Erin Lee with Macquarie. Your line is now open.

Aaron, Analyst Hey guys, thanks for the question. Yeah, I appreciate all the color on the call about guidance and the games. Maybe just starting with guidance. So I understand why revenue could end up in the lower end of the range, just given the factors that you've laid out, the planned marketing spend reduction and consumer softening.

But if the marketing spend is coming down, wouldn't that imply a benefit to EBITDA? So is winding up in the lower end of the range just cost deleverage, or can you help me understand that? Elad Amit, SVP Corporate Finance and FP&A Yeah, Aaron, thanks for the question. On the range, we reaffirmed it.

Q2 came in ahead of consensus on revenue and adjusted EBITDA. You saw the margin uplift versus the first quarter and you also saw SuperPlay turning EBITDA positive as we said it would. What we're doing is guiding you where inside the range we currently expect to land because we want to find alignment on the shape of the remaining second half of the year versus how the Street may be modeling the business. Our first half came in above where the Street had it and the full-year range hasn't moved since we updated the range in the past call, and we want to close that gap and we prefer to do it now versus later in the year after the third quarter.

There's a couple different things driving the second half. The first, as you just mentioned, is sort of the biggest and it's entirely ours. We front-loaded user acquisition into the first half, especially into the first quarter, and that's largely driven by the structure of the earnout. That spend steps down in the second half; the revenue follows spend with a lag.

So second-half revenue steps down sequentially from the first half. One thing to note for everyone as you model the back half of the year: that reduction is also weighted toward the third quarter. That's where the largest single step-down sits, and then you see more even spend in the last quarter versus third. So the second-half sequential pattern, it's not linear.

It's timing, it's not trajectory. The title where we'll see the biggest change in marketing spend in the first half versus second half, we expect those titles to still grow year over year. Now, coming back to your question around some of the cost leverage, one aspect of it is also within Bingo. The decline that we reported this quarter is concentrated in players we acquired within the last 12 months following some of the mix change in marketing that we made in Q4 of last year.

Now that change annualizes through the back half, so the year-over-year comparisons do get a little bit harder in the second half, not easier. And so I'd underline the other side of that, which is that our players who've been with the game for over a year were essentially flat, and they do generate the majority of the game's revenue today. And that is part of the franchise we're managing to. But again, some of the portfolio mix shift does impact EBITDA.

In addition to that, you've heard us say this before: we reserve the right to think about incremental spend as the year ends in order to give us that strong start heading into the year after. So some of it is flexibility, some of it is the portfolio mix shift. And then the last point that I'll just emphasize, which we spoke about on the call, is around the consumer. And again, this is specifically why we're pointing to the lower end of the ranges.