Wynn Resorts, Limited

Welcome to the Wind Resort's first quarter earnings call. All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question and answer session of today's conference. To ask a question, press star 1 on your touchtone phone. Record your name and I will introduce you. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the line over to Julie Cameron Doe, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today are Craig Billings and Brian Gulbrunson, Las Vegas. Also on the line are Linda Chen, Frederick Luvisuto, and Jenny Holliday. I want to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements under safe harbor federal securities laws, and those statements may or may not come true. I will now turn the call over to Craig Billings.

Thanks, Julie, and afternoon, everyone, as always. Thanks for joining us today. The momentum that we generated in the business throughout 2023 continued into 2024 as we delivered all-time record property EBITDA of 647 million during the first quarter of 2024. I'm incredibly proud of all of our team members who remain so focused on delivering five-star service and one-of-a-kind experiences to our guests. A heartfelt thank you to each of you. Turning to the quarter and starting here in Vegas, when Las Vegas delivered 246 million of adjusted property EBITDA, a first quarter record, and up 6% year-on-year on a very difficult comp. As we noted on our last call, most of the action in the quarter was concentrated in February as the combination of Super Bowl and Chinese New Year drove all-time record EBITDA during the month. The quarter was characterized by strong performance across our non-gaming businesses, with revenue growing 16% year-on-year, led by 21% growth in hotel revenue, along with healthy volumes in the casino. Through our unique combination of the best service levels in the market, continuous reinvestment in our property, and our only-at-win programming, we continue to fire on all cylinders here in Las Vegas. More recently, our top-line trends remained healthy in April, with drop, candle, and rev par all up year-over-year on yet another difficult comp. Turning to Boston, Encore generated $63 million of EBITDA during the quarter. The team in Boston successfully navigated a confluence of poor weather in January and inflationary pressures during the quarter, as EBITDA and revenue at the property were largely stable year-on-year. There were encouraging pockets of strength in the quarter, with record slot handle and strong year-on-year growth in hotel revenue. More recently, demand has remained healthy through April with particular strength in slot handle and rev bar. On the development across from Encore Boston Harbor, we have put this development on hold for the time being, as we have been unable to reach an agreement with local authorities on certain financial terms. Though it's disappointing, we have numerous other development projects globally where we can redirect the capital we intended to deploy in Boston. Turning to Macau, We generated $340 million of EBITDA in the quarter on GGR market share that was above both the prior quarter and above our 2019 exit rate. We held above our expected range, so on a fully normalized basis, EBITDA would have been approximately $320 million. The strength in our business has continued into Q2. In the casino, our mass drop per day in April increased 30% versus April 2019, and on the non-gaming side, our hotel occupancy was 99%. Overall, strong top line performance combined with disciplined OpEx control drove healthy margins during April. We were also pleased with results during May Golden Week, particularly in light of unfavorable weather in the region. In the casino, mass drop per day increased 30% versus the comparable 2019 holiday period and approach levels seen during last Chinese New Year. On the development front in Macau, we began initial demolition and construction work on our second concession-related project, our destination food hall. We are well into design and planning for our other major concession-related CapEx commitments, including our new event and entertainment center and a unique theater and show. Turning to Wynne Almarjan in the UAE, construction is rapidly advancing on the project, and as of this week, we are currently constructing the fourth floor of the hotel tower. You can find recent renderings and images of Wynn Almarjan in a press release we issued yesterday ahead of a major travel convention taking place this week in Dubai. And I expect we will further update you on the advances we have made on the project later this year. Finally, we are actively considering greenfield development opportunities in New York City and potentially Thailand. In New York, we believe a full-scale Wynn Integrated Resort in Hudson Yards will drive meaningful incremental tax revenue, tourism, and employment in the state. Despite the elongation of the RFA submission process in New York, we remain intrigued by the prospect of a wind resort in Manhattan. In Thailand, it's early days and we have yet to see the regulatory and licensing structures. Thailand is already a major tourism destination with significant tourism infrastructure and a world-class service culture, so we will continue to closely monitor advancement of the legalization process. I remain incredibly bullish about the future of our company. In Las Vegas, we remain at the pinnacle of the market with tremendous demand for what we offer. And in an inflationary environment like this, we have the luxury of being able to reprice our hotel rooms every day in order to take advantage of that demand. In Macau, we continue to punch above our weight on a revenue per hotel room basis, generating meaningful market share and substantial discretionary free cash flow. We also have a meaningful high ROI project underway in the UAE, along with potential greenfield developments in other attractive gateway cities. Meanwhile, our leverage profile continues to improve, as does our outlook on future free cash flow. Our best days lie ahead. With that, I will now turn it over to Julie to run through some additional details on the quarter. Julie?

Thank you, Craig. At Wynn Las Vegas, we generated $246.3 million in adjusted property EBITDA on $636.5 million of operating revenue during the quarter, delivering an EBITDA margin of 38.7%. Hold was a bit of a mixed bag, given results in the sportsbook, and we estimate a net $5 million benefit from higher-than-normal hold in the quarter. OPEX excluding gaming tax per day was $4.1 million in Q1 2024, up 9% Euro the year, and in line with the increase in operating revenue, as we successfully absorbed incremental OPEX related to Super Bowl programming, union-related payroll increases, and other inflationary pressures. Turning to Boston, we generated adjusted property EBITDA of $63 million on revenue of $217.8 million, with an EBITDA margin of 29%. We've stayed very disciplined on the cost side, and excluding a $2 million benefit from a one-time item, OPEX per day was $1.19 million in Q1 2024, up around 2% year-over-year. The team has done a great job mitigating union-related payroll increases with cost efficiencies in areas of the business that do not impact the guest experience. Our Macau operations delivered adjusted property EBITDA of $339.6 million in the quarter on $998.6 million of operating revenues. As Craig alluded to, we estimate higher than normal hold positively impacted EBITDA by around $19 million during the quarter. VIP hold was largely in the normal range, with the hold impact primarily related to higher than normal hold on WinPalace's mass table game. EBITDA margin was 34% in the quarter, an increase of 140 basis points relative to Q4 2023, and 310 basis points relative to Q1 2019. Our strong margin expansion relative to 2019 has been driven by a combination of the favorable mix shift to higher margin mass gaming and operating leverage on cost efficiencies. Our OPEX excluding gaming tax was approximately $2.6 million per day in Q1, a decrease of 17% compared to $3.2 million in Q1 2019. OPEX increased 3% on a sequential basis, well below the 10% increase in operating revenue. The team has done a great job staying disciplined on cost, and we remain well positioned to drive strong operating leverage as the market continues to recover. In terms of CAPEX in Macau, we're currently advancing through the design and planning stages on several of our concession commitments. And as we noted the past few quarters, these projects require a number of government approvals, creating a wide range of potential CAPEX outcomes in the near term. As such, we continue to expect capex related to our concession commitments to range between $350 million and $500 million in total between 2024 and the end of 2025. Moving on to the balance sheet, our liquidity position remains very strong with global cash and revolver availability of nearly $4.2 billion as of March 31st. This was comprised of $2.2 billion of total cash and available liquidity in Macau and approximately $2 billion in the U.S. On the capital markets front, in February we issued a $400 million add-on to the Wynn Resorts Finance 2031 unsecured notes, with net proceeds along with cash on hand used to fund the tender and repurchase of $800 million of Wynn Las Vegas notes maturing in March 2025. Over the past four quarters, we've reduced company-wide gross debt by approximately $1 billion, Bringing it all together, the combination of strong performance in each of our markets globally, with our properties generating over $2.3 billion of trailing 12-month property EBITDA, together with our robust cash position, creates a very healthy consolidated net leverage ratio of just over four times. Our strong free cash flow and liquidity profile allows us to reduce leverage while returning capital to shareholders. To that end, the Board approved a cash dividend of $0.25 per share payable on May 31, 2024, to stockholders of record as of May 20, 2024. Additionally, in late March, the Wynn Macau Board recommended the reinstatement of a dividend at 7.5 cents per share, or 50 million U.S. dollars, highlighting our commitment to prudently returning capital to shareholders in both the U.S. and Macau. Finally, our capex in the quarter was 97.7 million dollars, primarily related to the villa renovations and food and beverage enhancements at Wynn Las Vegas, concession-related capex in Macau, and normal course maintenance across the business. Additionally, we contributed $70 million of equity to the Wynn-Almarjan Island JV project during the quarter, bringing our total equity contribution to date to approximately $160 million. With that, we will now open up the call to Q&A.

Thank you. To ask a question, please press star one on your touchtone phone. Unmute your phone, record your name clearly after the prompt, and I will introduce you for your question. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. To withdraw your question, you may press star two. One moment, please, for our first question. Carlo Santorelli from Deutsche Bank, you may go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Julie. Craig, just In terms of what you're seeing in Macau, obviously you guys had a strong quarter. Everything seemed to flow through very nicely. In terms of the competitive landscape that you are seeing into May now relative to perhaps what you were seeing last quarter or fourth quarter more specifically, could you kind of characterize what's the market at this point?

Yes, sure, Carlo. You cut out a little bit there at the end, but I got the gist of your question. Macau has always been and is currently a competitive market. And as you know, we focus on product and service, and we focus on attracting the best guests in the market. So I've seen a lot of the questions and the commentary around promotional activity. I don't really want to speak to promotional activity by others in the market, but I can tell you that our reinvestment can move 50, 75 basis points in any given quarter, depending upon what we are trying to achieve. But the core of our competitive strength remains product and service. And I think you can see that in Q1 with both our results and our margin.

Helpful. Thank you. And then, Craig, just going back to your remarks on Las Vegas, you made a point of kind of calling out February being the primary driver of the quarter. You then followed that up with drop, handle, revpar, kind of all up in April, and mentioned kind of tougher comparisons along the way. How do you kind of foresee what is a very obviously tough comp stack as you move through the balance of this year in the market?

Sure. Well, first, as it specifically relates to drop and handle, you know, we've almost doubled handle from 2019 to 2023, and a lot of that was share-taking. We have table drop that's up almost 50 percent in the same period, so not too shabby. And as you know, I've said on several calls, trees don't grow to the sky. But all that being said, the comps are getting tougher. And, you know, if you go to a CPI calculator online, you will find that the purchasing power of a dollar today is the same is about 80 cents in March of 2019. So for a casino and a hotel operator, like us, who can reprice rooms every day, and whose customers' gaming bankrolls reflect the current value of a dollar, we shouldn't be surprised that results today, when compared to the past, look pretty good. Of course, that pricing power is exacerbated by the strength of what we offer here in Las Vegas, with the best service quality, the best physical experience, and top-notch programs. You can layer on top of that that our target customer base who can now earn five points on their money just by putting it in the bank and that has seen pretty strong wealth creation over the past several quarters. It's a pretty powerful EBITDA setup. Of course, by the way, the vast majority of our deployed capital here and our debt is in yesterday's dollars. So that EBITDA setup also works wonders for returns and discretionary free cash flow. I digress slightly, but you know, When do things go from absolutely unbelievable to just really great? I don't know the answer to that. The best I can do is give you a clear picture of what we're seeing right now, as I did in my prepared remarks with respect to April, and it's good.

Thank you.

Thank you. And our next caller is Joe Greff with JPMorgan. You may go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, everybody. My first question is on Macau and follows up on Carlos' Macau-related promotional question. If we look at the 1Q, the conversion of gross gaming revenues to Macau to casino revenues, was that a better clip than it was in the fourth quarter and all of last year by quarter? How much of that sequential improvement over the last couple of quarters is just a function of maybe a high hold versus maybe you're operating the business than maybe some of your peers who are seeing that relationship sequence less favorably for them than it has for you.

Yeah, thanks, Joe. It has a lot to do with the revamp of our loyalty program and the fact that we have given our customers choice in terms of how they want their reinvestment. And so in any given quarter, those choices change. And some of those choices flow to contra revenue and some of those choices flow to op-eds. So that's really the primary driver. It's not indicative of a systemic change in the aggregate reinvestment.

That's all for me. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next caller is Sean Kelly with Bank of America. You may go ahead, sir.

Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. Craig or Julie, I just want to ask about maybe the Macau OPEX trajectory. Obviously, you've driven and sound like you expect to continue to see some pretty great operating leverage there. But it is, you know, we're still normalizing in that market. It's probably a little bit tougher for us to get a sense of just sort of underlying core, you know, expense growth or inflation. So kind of any comments as things start to annualize and normalize a little bit? You know, how much kind of on a year-on-year basis? you'd expect that to level off to maybe in the back half of the year?

Sure. Hey, Sean, I'll take that one. Yeah, we've talked quite a bit about OPEX and, you know, how we've been very disciplined in managing it and how we've been able to accommodate, you know, the non-gaming OPEX that we have to send to meet our concession commitments. So, you know, we've been really disciplined. We had OPEX per day of 2.63 million in Q1. So it's still well below Q1-19 levels, and it's only up 3% sequentially. It was a big queue in terms of what we call tentpole events. And obviously, the OPEX increase is well below the 10% we've had sequentially in operating revenue. So we were really pleased with the flow through there. Going forward, we're going to continue to be really disciplined around OPEX. We have a good line of sight to the events calendar and how we'll continue to incorporate that. As we have our EBITDA margin of both properties above Q1 2019 levels and our OPEX well controlled, we really expect RevenueMix to be the key driver of margins going forward. We're going to have some quarter to quarter variation as we see different events on the And we continue to roll out programming. But we feel pretty good about where we've managed to land with OPEX. And we see potential for some quarters to be slightly inside of that 2.63. And maybe in a bigger quarter, it might be slightly outside of that. But overall, we're in a good place.

Super. Thank you. And just as my follow-up, Craig, to go back to sort of the Las Vegas macro commentary, I mean, I think what many of us struggling with it. I'm sure you're familiar with this in conversations with industry executives is just, you know, there have been some comments out there about, you know, some leisure, you know, even at the high end, you know, some leisure pushback when maybe the product mix isn't perfect. And I think in some cases, it looks like Wynn is kind of perfect on many of these metrics. But I'm just curious, as you look through all the KPIs across your business, did you see any area of skittishness? I mean, any area that you would consider normalization or movement around, or the truth is the dynamics are alive and well there, and again, we may just need to be looking somewhere else across the strip or outside of Las Vegas to see that change in the consumer right now.

Yeah, sure, Sean. Not really. So, If you think about what's happening in Vegas, those who have deployed capital in Vegas over the course of the past five years, it actually hasn't been so much, at least innovative capital, it actually hasn't been so much the industry. It's been the Sphere, it's been the Raiders, it's been a smaller but still impactful capital deployment here that has driven all kinds of demand to the market. You've heard our competitors talk about this as well, and we have a unique position in the markets. So, again, I'll say it. Trees don't go to the sky, and comps get tougher and tougher over time. But from a pricing power perspective, we feel great, certainly relative to the rest of the strip. Brian, do you have any comments on what we're seeing in the booking window at this point?

Yeah, I mean, everything's pretty much resolved. with respect to bookings. And when you look at the pace of group, we continue to pace to have our best year ever, over 23, which was our best year ever, and 25 and 26 are pacing nicely. Not just in group, but we're focus on our people, our assets, our experiential events that we put together really allow us to just drive price and continue to balance all our channels.

And what he means by 2019 is that it's reverted to a normal, a very normal booking process.

The booking windows are back to normal. Yeah. And it's quite nice.

Very clear. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Our next caller is Dan Pallater with Wells Fargo. You may go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Just one quick one on Las Vegas. In terms of your occupancy of that property, I mean, you typically run in the high 80s there. I mean, you're getting as much rate as it looks like you want. I mean, fundamentally, is that property structurally different in that, you know, relative to the Macau properties where you run occupancy close to 99%? It just seems like, you know, I know there's a balance there, but any reason occupancy in Vegas couldn't go higher as you keep pushing rates up modestly?

Sure. So, first and foremost, and this is true company-wide, we never want to be in a position where we have to walk someone because we don't have their room type or we don't have their room available for them. Second, at some point, the experience on the property actually degrades if you get to use an extreme 99 percent occupancy. So, we're always balancing occupancy and rate in order to drive to drive strong revenue results, but also maintain a great experience on the property. Macau is very different. Macau, there is a decent amount of occupancy that occurs on the day. So, you know, you have people that are in market, and we will offer them a room while they're in market, so you have the ability to drive up that occupancy very, very close to 100%. So it's really just a difference in market dynamics. And can we run higher in Vegas? Sure we could. We could do that, and at times we do. We do run higher, and then it washes out later in the quarter where we run lower. It's really just a question of the on-premises experience and maximizing revenue.

Got it. And then just switching to Thailand, maybe could you talk a little bit about that opportunity potentially? I know it's quite early days. but just high level in terms of timing, project size, you know, how competitive you think this process would be, an incremental color would be great. Thanks.

Sure. Yeah, it is very early. I mean, first things first, we need to understand that the regulatory structure, the licensing structure, the bidding structure, et cetera, are all going to be, you know, consistent with other jurisdictions that are considered best-in-class. I personally think they will be based on the information that we have to date, but that's really a condition precedent to our further involvement. It's an interesting market for the reasons that I described in my prepared remarks, lots of great infrastructure, a very strong tourism sector today, and I think it will be a competitive process. I think in any market like that that has those dynamics, I think you're going to find a lot of folks that are interested in being there. And we are very confident in our capabilities, given the strength of the portfolio as it exists today and the talent that we have in this business.

Got it. Thanks so much.

Sure.

Thank you. Our next caller is John Ducree with CBRE. You may go ahead.

Hi, good morning, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. First one may be Craig, you've introduced some new renderings and photos of Al Marjan in front of the ATM conference here in Dubai. I'm curious if you could remind us total capital contribution and budget or construction cost and if that's changed at all since you've kind of updated the renderings for that project.

Sure. The total budget is around $4 billion. Budgets move here and there, but no substantial movement. Our capital contribution will be, round numbers call it, $900 million. That heavily depends on the construction leverage, so we're in the midst of figuring that out now, but you can figure something like 50-50 debt to equity, and then we would be 40% of the equity.

Got it. Understood. That's helpful. Thank you. And then maybe one back domestically to get a little granular, perhaps in Las Vegas on the quarter. You called out February. We knew that was going to be an event-driven month, but I was wondering if you could kind of parse out what January and March look like. I know you gave some color on April coming out of the quarter quite strong, but as you kind of sized up the one cue, any comments about January and March specifically relative to year over year in terms of performance?

Sure. What I would say is this, February, as we called out it would be, was, of course, the strongest month of the quarter. And then in rank order, it would be March and January.

Got it. Understood. Thanks so much.

Thank you. Our next caller is Robin Farley with UBS.

Great, thanks. I wonder if you could just touch on anything for El Marjan that has to happen from a regulatory perspective, approval at any level, if the construction were done tomorrow before it could actually start operating the casino, just to clarify that. Thank you.

Sure, Robin. Just like other jurisdictions, there are regulatory requirements that are required before we can open the doors. And so we expect that we will meet those regulatory requirements and receive the necessary approvals in due course.

But is there anything from a framework perspective in terms of anything that has to be legalized at any level or, you know, separate from just what we're going to have to do to meet licensing?

We're not building on spec. Put it that way. So I think you've seen, hopefully you've seen that they have created a federal regulatory body called the GCGRA in order to license and issue license operators and issue regulations associated with gaming. The GCGRA's activities are ongoing and we are aware of what they are and we'll get all the necessary approvals in due course.

Okay, thank you.

Sure.

Thank you. Our next caller is Ben Chaykin with Mizuho. You may go ahead.

Hey, just one quick one in Macau. The Win Macau property, your mass hold is around 19% for the second quarter in a row after holding below normal for a long period of time. Do you think the current gaming volumes at this property are enough to have more normalized variability in hold, such as what we've seen in the last few quarters? Any color there would be great. Thanks.

Sure, and then we held high subsequent to the end of the quarter. It really is just a function of the normal ebb and flow of the game. A lot of that has to do with the volume of high-end play. And so there's really nothing, there's really not a lot to see there, and over time, hold will normalize.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Sure. Operator, we'll take one last question after this one.

Thank you. And that last caller comes from David Cass with Jefferies. You may go ahead, sir.

Thank you for taking my question. Afternoon, everyone. I wanted to just touch on Las Vegas. Given the content that's going on in the market and given the available resources that you have, I just wonder under what circumstances you might look at developing some of the access lines you have in Las Vegas and what would have to happen.

Thanks, David. You were chopping up there a bit, but I think I got the gist of your question. I think you were addressing the development opportunities in the land that we have here. Yeah, we have a very substantial land bank in Las Vegas, as you know, and the reality is that we are replete with choices now from a development perspective. We've got the project going on In the UAE, by the way, we will have a land bank there as well. We're obviously looking at New York. We are considering Thailand as that process evolves. And so we have a lot of things in the hopper at the moment that are going to, you know, meaningfully increase our EBITDA and our free cash flow base. And we are always considering particularly the adjacent land on the strip. as a potential development opportunity, but we really want to see how some of these other things play out.

And that was the nature of my question, sort of what would have to happen for you to want to move forward on Las Vegas? Would some of these have to fall out or just move forward and this comes at ranks after that? I think that was just a nuance to what I was trying to get at. Thank you.

Sure. Yeah. So the reality is it's, um, many things. So what happens in the macro economy? What happens to borrowing costs? What happens to the cost to build? Um, and then what are our other opportunities? How many of those opportunities can we push through our design and development team at any given point in time? So it's, uh, it's a, I don't know, five D question, I guess. I don't know if you can get into the fifth dimension, but there's a lot of, uh, There's a lot of questions there. And right now, we're focused on New York. We're observing Thailand, and we're in the midst of constructing in the UAE. So we like our development pipeline at the moment. We like our future EBITDA and free cash flow profile at the moment. So stay tuned.

I will. Thank you.

Sure. Thank you. And thank you, operator. With that, we'll bring this call to a close. We thank you for your interest in the company and look forward to talking to you again next quarter. Thanks, everybody.

And thank you for participating on today's conference call.