GCL Global Holdings H1 FY2026 Earnings Call - Ban Leong Acquisition Doubles Revenue, But Integration Costs and Game Delays Pressure Profits

Drew, Conference Call Operator: Good morning, and welcome to GCL’s first half fiscal year 2026 earnings conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. Please note that this call is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Crocker Colson, Investor Relations for GCL Global Holdings. Mr. Colson, the floor is yours.

Crocker Colson, Investor Relations, GCL Global Holdings: Thanks so much, Drew. Good morning, everyone. Good evening to those of you in Asia, and thanks to all of you for joining us to review GCL’s first half fiscal year 2026 results. This morning, GCL posted both the earnings release and an investor presentation for this call to our website, which you can find at ir.gclglobalholdings.com. With us on the call today are Sebastian Tok, GCL’s Group Chief Executive Officer, and Kenny Lin, GCL’s Group Chief Financial Officer. After the prepared remarks are concluded, we plan to open up this call for your questions. Before we begin, some statements in this teleconference are forward-looking within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Although we believe these statements are reasonable, we can provide no assurance that they will prove to be accurate because they are prospective in nature.

Actual results may differ materially from those discussed today, and we encourage you to review our most recent filings with the SEC for risk factors that could materially impact our results. As I mentioned, you can find the earnings release, and the PowerPoint at the IR section at gclglobalholdings.com. We encourage you to review the reconciliations of certain non-GAAP measures contained within. With that, it’s now my pleasure to turn the call over to GCL’s Group CEO, Sebastian Tok. Sebastian, over to you.

Sebastian Tok, Group Chief Executive Officer, GCL Global Holdings: Thank you, Crocker. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us from wherever you are. I’m Sebastian Tok, Group CEO of GCL Global Holdings. Today, I’ll walk you through our first half fiscal year 2026 results and share how we are building the foundations for long-term growth. The past six months have been nothing short of a transformation. We’ve expanded our scale, diversified our platform, and invested in the creative and commercial engines that will drive the group forward. With that, let’s quickly start with the summary and our financial numbers. For the first half of fiscal year 2026, our group revenues reached $98.7 million, nearly doubling year-on-year. This growth reflects the consolidation of Ban Leong Technologies, whose hardware and consumer electronics distribution has broadened our reach across Asia.

It also underscores the resilience in our ecosystem strategy across video games, consumer electronics, and gaming hardware, where we continue to grow as a group despite industry-wide delays in game releases. For the same period, gross profit rose 54.5% to $10.8 million. Now, while gross margin compressed to 11% from 13.8%, this was largely expected, given the integration of the hardware distribution pillar. While hardware distribution carries lower margins, it provides scale, recurring cash flow, and a stronger platform for our ecosystem. Net loss was at $5.6 million, compared to $0.8 million in profit last year. This reflects integration costs associated with the acquisition, higher operating expenses, and one-off expense items tied to the Ban Leong acquisition. Importantly, these are investments in infrastructure, systems, and compliance that positions us for sustainable growth.

EBITDA for the group swung to a loss of $2.7 million from a gain of $0.7 million the same period before. Again, this is a function of the expansion and acquisition costs in which we are absorbing today to unlock efficiencies and synergies tomorrow. What’s important is that our continued top-line growth demonstrates demand and scale in our business, while the group executes on deliberate investments in all business verticals in building a stronger company. When we look at the strategic progress of the group beyond the numbers, the first half of this year was all about execution. We completed the acquisition and delisting of Ban Leong Technologies, a distributor with over 30 years of history and partnerships with more than 50 global brands, such as Razer, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Huawei, amongst others.

This gives us multi-channel distribution across e-commerce, retail, and corporate resellers in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Integration is underway post-acquisition, with a focus on operational alignment and cost efficiencies. This represents our strategic move in capturing the full ecosystem of video gaming from game development, game publishing, game distribution, and now a presence in consumer electronics and gaming hardware. Moving over to game publishing, we continue to see good demand for our existing portfolio, which includes titles such as Black Myth: Wukong, Atomic Heart, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Japanese Drift Master, and many others. Within this first half, we’ve also released Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree in Asia. We’ve unveiled Island of Hearts, a full motion game which doubles as a collaborative effort between our subsidiaries, Fourth Divinity and Titan Digital Media.

Excitingly, we’ve just revealed the trailer for The Defiant, a high visual fidelity, World War II tactical FPS game. The trailer, which we’ve exclusively shown on IGN’s channel for the first 24 hours, generated a strong global buzz, with comparisons to Call of Duty and recognition for its cultural authenticity. We were pleasantly surprised with the global hype and how well-received the trailer was, because for the first time ever, a single-player, story-driven, World War II FPS game will be telling the story from an Asian perspective, paying tribute to the personal sacrifices and war stories that occurred during the war of resistance against Japan. The Defiant, along with our other upcoming game releases, reflects our strategy of blending Asian-developed IPs with global storytelling for the masses.

On strategic investments, I’m also happy to announce that as of the announcement that we have just released an hour ago, our publishing subsidiary, Fourth Divinity, has just received an additional $10 million in strategic investments from ADATA Technology, who is a world leader in the memory and storage solution space. Now, this investment is following the initial $3 million investment made from ADATA back in December 2025, thus bringing the total investment from ADATA to be at $13 million to date. The investments into Fourth Divinity was done at a valuation of $250 million, thus reinforcing and validating Fourth Divinity’s position as a leading game publisher internationally, along with our upcoming pipeline of game titles. This capital truly strengthens our ability to secure additional high-profile titles and expands our capacity in game publishing and game development.

Moving on to game partnerships and expansion, we’ve signed an MOU to acquire a majority stake in Alliance-Star International in Taiwan, developer of a mobile game titled Kingdom Under Fire: Civil War. Now, this deal is currently ongoing and acts as an important milestone as it empowers us with additional game development capabilities and marks our first foray into mobile game development. Taken together, this move expands our ecosystem across game development, publishing, distribution, and a full suite, further enhancing our scale and diversity to support consistent performance and growth over time. Now, I’ll pass the next part to Kenny Lin, our CFO, to run through some highlights on the balance sheet and the financial numbers.

Kenny Lin, Group Chief Financial Officer, GCL Global Holdings: Thank you, Sebastian. Let me walk you through the balance sheet for GCL. As of September 30th, we have held $19.8 million in cash and cash equivalents, including restricted cash. We have established a $38.7 million secured term facility with a maturity to 2030, providing financial flexibility to support acquisitions and integration within the group. We are, however, revising our full year guidance to revenues exceeding $210 million and gross profit above $21 million, down from previous guidance of $240 million and $30 million respectively. This adjustment attributes mainly to two game titles delay from official year 2026 to 2027, as the management views that there are significant refinements required to make this title for the period for launch, which again, reflects our true commitment in releasing high-quality game titles.

However, just to highlight these, short-term delays in the game releases does not change our long-term trajectory. Looking ahead, fiscal year 2027 is shaping up to be a breakthrough year. With our key titles in our IP portfolio scheduled for release and the benefits of our unified ecosystem coming through, we are excited and optimistic on what lies ahead for GCL. Let me pass the mic back to Sebastian.

Sebastian Tok, Group Chief Executive Officer, GCL Global Holdings: So as a closing, just to summarize the key highlights for this period. The group nearly doubled revenues in the first half of fiscal year 2026. We’ve expanded our platform with the acquisition of Ban Leong and strengthened our publishing pipeline in accordance to some of the exciting game titles that you’ve seen in the public domain that we’ve made over the last few months as well. We secured a strategic investment from ADATA that validates the strong build-out of our publishing business and the upcoming IP pipeline. And last but not least, we’ve laid the groundwork for fiscal year 2027, where we expect our ecosystem to start delivering on scale and along with more title releases within our game publishing universe.

So our story truly is one of growth, integration, and investing in strong IPs, where we continue to build the group as a video gaming powerhouse that unites content and hardware, bridging cultures and delivering authentic experiences to gaming communities worldwide for the games that you deserve. Again, we thank you for your continued support as you dial in from wherever you are, and we’ll now move on to the Q&A portion of today’s webcast for any questions or feedback that you may have... Operator, over to you.

Drew, Conference Call Operator: Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you are on the speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Scott Buck with H.C. Wainwright & Co. Please go ahead.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co.: Hello, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First one, Sebastian, I was hoping you could provide just a bit more color on the types of synergies you expect to get as you continue to integrate Ban Leong.

Sebastian Tok, Group Chief Executive Officer, GCL Global Holdings: Okay. Scott, nice to hear from you again. Well, as we’ve spoken from before, the Ban Leong acquisition represents one of many things. If we look at the Ban Leong business as a whole, distribution of consumer electronics and hardware is a very stable business by itself. But when we look at the video gaming industry as a whole, software and hardware is an integral part of the entire industry. As we’ve mentioned from our previous calls and, you know, in some of the speeches that I’ve done in the public domain, in the games that have been coming forth to the market, we’re seeing higher and higher visual fidelity. Naturally, that links to the need for better computers, better laptops, better parts as well.

So with the integration of Ban Leong, while we are developing the IP, while we’re distributing, while we’re investing in game IP, we are now also in the consumer electronics and hardware space, where good IP, strong game releases, which drives physical higher increase in demand for consumer electronics and hardware. This enables us to now capture the demand, the revenue, the increased uptick in higher margins that we expect from game development and game publishing, but also the eventual organic demand and supply that we are, that we are in for consumer electronics as well. Apart from just forming the ecosystem that branches out from IP to hardware, as we’re developing the IP, we’ll need to market the IP as well.

When you’re looking at some of the limited edition, higher margin or limited runs in terms of the graphic cards or the laptops, they have done pretty well in the market today. These limited series comes with an IP attached to it. So when we are developing the IP, we now have the option to overlay the IP with some of the physical products that we’re distributing. This adds on the additional visibility on the IP that we’re developing. This also branches out into new business synergies that we have between distributing and publishing games, along with the bundling of the physical products as well. So when you look at the distribution side of the business that we have for Epicsoft, distribution of physical games versus distribution of consumer electronics and hardware, they’ve got overlapping pillars as well.

So in the integration of the acquisition, we’ve found some efficiencies in the logistics, the warehousing, the manpower, and eventually, as we come together for the new fiscal 2027... fiscal year 2026 is all about integration, which is why, as we’ve mentioned in the speech earlier, the next coming fiscal year 2027 is all about delivering efficiencies in scale. So as a summary, I think, I’d like to just kind of sum up in a few points. One, while we’re developing the IP, that gives us the ability to overlay IP with hardware. Two, we’re gonna operate with additional efficiencies, thus unlocking additional value for the group.

Three, as we are building the IP, as we’re distributing game, as the game industry continues to grow, organically, we expect the growth to be seen in the gaming hardware space as well, and thereby that diversifies our financial streams, eventually building a future-proof strategy for the business as a whole. So I hope that kind of gives you better clarity.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co.: Yeah, no, that’s fantastic color. I appreciate that. And then my second question, just given the guide and, I guess the push from 2026 into fiscal 2027 due to some game title timing, generally, what does your visibility look like in terms of publishing schedules? I mean, when do you start to get, you know, real comfortable in being able to put numbers for 2027 out there, guidance for 2027?

Sebastian Tok, Group Chief Executive Officer, GCL Global Holdings: Sure. We tend to get visibility, I would say, better visibility 6-9 months ahead of the release. And in this adjustment that we’ve made today, right, where we adjusted the revenue guidance for this year, it’s one of a measured approach. Why? It’s because as a game publisher, we work very closely with the game developers within our portfolio as well. It’s one thing to kind of rush out a game that we feel is incomplete, just for the sake of meeting certain timelines, and it’s another thing to hold back the release to ensure that the product is complete, it’s done to a standard that we think is palatable to the gamers. And in this case, it was of the latter.

Now, being in the game industry for almost two decades as a group, we pride ourselves in understanding what a good game is, right? Selling games, investing into games, publishing, and now going to development as well. We think that first and foremost, the gaming community deserves a well-built game. So in the publishing business, and which is, I mean, when you look at the amendment to the profit and the revenue guidance that we’ve done, it was exactly us taking on this measured approach to delay the release of two games, which pushes some numbers from FY 2026 to FY 2027, only because we saw the opportunity to enhance the gaming experience, to complete the game in a more robust manner, thereby having a better chance for our game to be better appreciated from the gaming community.

So in this case, the publisher, along with the developer, we do have some voice and a say in delaying the game release if there is a need to, in enhancing the gameplay as well, which is exactly the reason why we’ve done that.

Scott Buck, Analyst, H.C. Wainwright & Co.: Yep, that makes sense. Well, that’s all I had, guys. I appreciate the time. Thank you.

Sebastian Tok, Group Chief Executive Officer, GCL Global Holdings: Thanks, Scott.

Drew, Conference Call Operator: Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. I will now turn it back to Sebastian for closing remarks.

Sebastian Tok, Group Chief Executive Officer, GCL Global Holdings: Thank you, Drew. We appreciate you taking the time to join us on the call today. If you continue to have any questions, please feel free to reach out to investor relations with any questions that you may have. Again, thank you for joining us on the call from wherever you may be, and do look out for the exciting developments for the group in the time to come. Thank you.

Drew, Conference Call Operator: That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.