Star Entertainment in Australia fails performance hurdles for seventh straight year

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(Reuters) -Embattled Australian casino operator Star Entertainment said on Wednesday that long-term performance rights awarded to its top executives and managers have lapsed for the seventh consecutive year after the company once again failed to meet key performance hurdles.

The rights granted for the year ending in June 2022 were canceled after Star fell short on all three metrics used to determine vesting – earnings per share, relative total shareholder return, and return on invested capital.

Each measure accounts for one-third of the award and vests only if Star’s relative TSR meets or exceeds the 50th percentile of its peer group — a threshold the company has not cleared since 2019.

Star’s total annualised return in Australian dollar terms has fallen 37.7% since the start of fiscal 2019, compared with an 8.8% growth in the ASX 200 benchmark index, as per LSEG data.

Its earnings per share, one of the key targets, fell from 32 Australian cents in 2017 to a loss of A$2.117 in 2023, before narrowing to a loss of 14.9 Australian cents in 2025.

The cash-strapped casino firm over the past few years has struggled to keep customers and has been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, initially by pandemic-related disruptions and later by regulatory curbs following scrutiny over potential breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws.

The LTI design was amended in fiscal 2025 to allocate 100% of the award to relative TSR, following a review.

Star’s shares were trading unchanged at 8.3 Australian cents apiece few minutes before trading close on Wednesday, after having risen up to 8.5 cents a share earlier in the session.

(Reporting by Shivangi Lahiri in Bengaluru; Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee)