Bally's Corporation

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Valleys Corporation fourth quarter 2022 and year end earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. In order to ask a question during this session, please press the start key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press start, then zero. I'd now like to turn the call over to Bobby Lavin, Chief Financial Officer for Bally's. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's call. The earnings release and presentation that accompany this call are available in the investor relations section of our website at www.bally's.com. With me on today's call, our incoming Chief Executive Officer, Robison Reeves, and George Tappanier, Valley's president. Before we begin, we would like to remind everyone that comments made by management today will contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include plans, expectations, estimates, and projections that involve significant risks and uncertainties. These risks are discussed in the company's earnings release and SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from the results discussed in these forward-looking statements. In addition, during today's call, Management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation is the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the schedules contained in our earnings release. We do not provide a reconciliation of forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures due to our inability to project special charges within certain expenses. Today's call is also being broadcast live on our investor site and will be available for replay shortly after the completion of this call. Let me hand the call over to Robeson.

Thanks, Bobby. I first want to thank Lee Fenton for his leadership over the past 14 years. We have a great working relationship and are great friends. He has been a wonderful mentor to me, and I've learned so much from him. We wouldn't be the global omnichannel leader we are today without him. I'm excited to be here and look forward to traveling to New York and other parts of the States to meet our investors in the coming months. We are three businesses that are coming together to be one. George and the team have done a great job on casinos and resorts. The portfolio's capex cycle has inflected in the cash generation at the properties while continuing to build a database for our interactive business is on track. We will execute on building the 1.7 billion Bally's Chicago, which will be game-changing for us in 2026. The temporary facility is on track to be open this year and will be the first test of the pent-up demand for gaming in Chicago. International Interactive started slow in the first quarter of 2022, but after the marketing and jackpot optimizations we executed, the UK business has been strong, growing 12% in the fourth quarter, well ahead of the market. Regulatory changes to the market in the UK are driving a new dynamic, with the smaller operators going away and the bigger operators gaining share. A trend I really believe will continue for the foreseeable future. In Asia, we added to the team recently and we're already seeing the fruits of their labor with the business positive year on year in December and January. We will invest some of our higher earnings into growth opportunities in rest of Europe, rest of world of Latin America. The first push will be this year. In January, we announced a restructuring in Interactive. The primary focus of this was North America, but we also saw this as an opportunity to streamline all of Interactive. Our technology development pipeline has been completely reworked, allowing for a more competitive and effective prioritization. Fewer dependencies amongst the teams have also reduced complexity. With 1,000 plus developers, me and my team having a tight grip on priorities is how we'll move faster and deliver near and long-term results to investors. In North America, our upward trajectory on iCasino continues. Our business in New Jersey has started to accelerate further with new payment methods and other options across Ontario and other markets too. Ontario trends look very, very similar. We plan to launch in Pennsylvania in the first half of 2023 and will continue to be iCasino first. On sports, we recognize that the Betworks acquisition did not give us the platform required to develop a competitive product. We didn't react fast enough there, and this will not happen again. We are confident there are more economical and nimble solutions out there and have spent the past five months analyzing them deeply. Sports for us is an acquisition tool. It can drive further engagement for the Bally's brand. So when we approach the choice of technology, we'll make sure we have that mindset. Many of you will be wondering how I'll lead the business. You should expect me to follow the data. I will be analytical in our approach to decision making to deliver customer-centric profitable solutions. I believe that the most valuable asset to deploy is focus. I will focus on opportunities with scale and go after them harder. As a company, we will prioritize. We'll prioritize the opening of the Chicago Temp on time and on budget, growing North America Interactive in a profitable way, our omnichannel data capabilities, sports for markets outside of North America, and taking Bally's Global. Now I'm going to hand over to Bobby.