Wynn Resorts, Limited

Welcome to the Wynn Resorts first quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants are on a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's conference. To ask a question, please press star 1 on your touchtone phone, record your name, and I will introduce you. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Craig Billings, President and Chief Financial Officer, sir, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today are Matt Maddox and Marilyn Spiegel in Las Vegas. Also on the line are Ian Collin, Kiran Kiruthers, Frederic Libesuto, and Brian Goldbrands. I want to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements under safe harbor federal security laws, and those statements may or may not come true. I will now turn the call over to Matt Maddox.

Thanks, Craig, and good afternoon, everyone. Before we dive right into the quarterly results, I'd like to first talk about how excited we are to announce the merger of Wynn Interactive into the Australis Acquisition Corp. As we've been thinking about online sports betting in the iGaming space over the last few years, we knew that we had to stick to what we do, which is build great products and provide the best customer service. Wynn Interactive is now a company with over 300 people. We have some of the luminaries from European Gaming, people, co-founders of BWIN, that are responsible for a lot of the product that we're developing in this 300-person team. And as we look out into the future and we realize this is likely going to be as large as the commercial casino revenue opportunity of $40 billion over the next five-plus years, which by the way, that's typically about how long it takes to build one of our bricks and mortar properties, around five years, we knew that this was an opportunity that we had to capitalize on. And so as we explored various options, it became very clear that creating a pure play public company in partnership with Bill Foley, one of the most renowned investors in the United States, was clearly the right thing to do to create the most value for the Wynn Resort shareholders and for the Wynn Interactive shareholders. Bill, just for those of you that don't know, has created over $100 billion in shareholder value during his investing career, $100 billion. He's the owner of a professional sports team. He owns luxury hospitality assets around the country. He recently completed the successful D-SPAC of PaySafe, a digital payments company that is now getting into the digital gaming space. So partnering with Bill and our team of 300 people and thinking about the product roadmap and the marketing dollars that we're going to invest to ensure that we're winners in this space, felt like the exact right thing to do, and we're very excited to have $640 million of committed capital injected into this company to launch this venture. We'll be posting a presentation online after this call that has a lot more details around this merger, and we'll be spending time after this call talking about it. With that, I'm going to go ahead and turn over to our quarterly results. And what we've been seeing in our properties in Macau, Las Vegas, and in Boston has been a very similar story. Momentum each month continuing to accelerate. As an example, in Macau, we generated $43.9 million of EBITDA in the first quarter. But it's moving so fast over there, I feel like talking about what we're seeing now is is more relevant than what we experienced in the first quarter as we saw strength continue into February and in March. So that momentum continued in April and in May. And in fact, during the Golden Week, which is the first week of May in Macau, we experienced and generated $3 million of normalized EBITDA per day during Golden Week. by far the highest amount of normalized profit that we've been able to generate since the onset of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020. Even with the junket volumes continuing to fluctuate between 25% and 30% of Golden Week 2019, we were able to achieve these results because we focused our business on masks and premium masks. And as we talked about in previous calls, we've been converting space that was previously for VIP into premium mass space and we feel very comfortable and confident with our position in the Macau market. In fact, we generated 76% of our mass volumes during the Golden Week this year compared to the Golden Week in 2019. Our hotel occupancy during Golden Week was 93%. And retail, which is continuing to be a shining star across our portfolio in North America and Macau, was up 80% over the Golden Week numbers in 2019. Going forward in May and into June, we do expect that May will continue to see acceleration over the April results. And we are very, very excited about the summer and what's going to come in Macau. Just seeing the earnings power over Golden Week and understanding where the Chinese consumer is headed and what our position in that market is makes us more confident and our position in Macau, in the Macau market, and our future development opportunities in and around Wind Palace to continue to build on what we do best and to grow our top line and our bottom line in Macau. Moving to North America and Las Vegas, again, we've seen very encouraging trends. We generated $28 million in EBITDA in the first quarter. What we really saw was right around March Madness was when the volumes began to pick up in the first quarter, and that has accelerated. As an example, in the month of April, our REVPAR, which is where we're really focused, has increased 50%, 5-0, over the first quarter results. Retail revenues in the month of April were the second best month on record. From 2005 till April of 2021, it was the second best month on record. And what's even more encouraging, and much more than a green shoot, but a clear indication of the roaring consumer that's coming back, our slot revenues in April were $25 million, which was a property record. More than any other month in the history of Wynn Las Vegas. So you take... Those things that we're already seeing in Las Vegas and looking at quarter to date, our EBITDA has already exceeded the first quarter in Las Vegas. Our weekends going forward are in the 90s in terms of hotel occupancy. And we're really focused on pricing and pricing power. Our group business is holding on and looking actually quite strong for the back half of the year. In fact, just last week we hosted our first large group of 600 people, and it went off without a hitch. People are so happy to be back. Conventions work. Customers are excited. And as more restrictions are lifted and we're able to really start to roll out our entertainment and our nightclubs and do what we do best, we think that Las Vegas' opportunity is is really unique and the best times are ahead. Moving to Boston at Encore Boston Harbor, we achieved record EBITDA of $30 million for the quarter, and that's even with restricted operating hours and quite significant COVID restrictions in the month of January. And that trend has continued. In fact, in the second quarter thus far, Our daily EBITDA is up 30 plus percent compared to the first quarter. Encore Boston Harbor is hitting on all cylinders right now. We've been able to really rationalize the cost, run the building much more efficiently, and focus on our casino customers and being the top super regional casino in the Northeast. I believe that Encore Boston Harbor is going to continue to grow quarter over quarter throughout this year as that property and that management team are really doing an amazing job. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Craig to provide more details on the quarter.