Live Nation Entertainment, Inc.

Good day, everyone. My name is Erica, and I will be your conference operator on today's call. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Live Nation Entertainment's fourth quarter and full year 2020 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. Following management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for Q&A. Instructions will be given at that time. Before we begin, Live Nation has asked me to remind you that this afternoon's call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risk and uncertainty that could cause actual results to differ, including statements related to the company's anticipated financial performance, business prospects, new developments, and similar matters. Please refer to Live Nation's SEC filings, including The risk factors and cautionary statements included in the company's most recent filings on Form 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K for a description of risk and uncertainties that could impact the actual results. Live Nation will also refer to some non-GAAP measures on this call. In accordance with the SEC Regulation G, Live Nation has provided a full reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP measures in their earnings released. The release reconciliation and other financial and statistical information to be discussed on this call can be found under the financial information section on Live Nation's website at investors.livenationentertainment.com. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference call over to Michael Rapinoe, President and Chief Executive Officer of Live Nation Entertainment. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. As we look back at 2020, It is clearly not the year anyone predicted, but I am very proud of how Live Nation has dug in and focused on turning this challenge into an opportunity to improve our business. I want to take a moment to thank our employees for their resilience and creativity and acknowledge all of those affected by COVID and the shutdown of live events. Over the last year, leaders across all of our business lines, concerts, ticket and sponsorship, have been analyzing ways to improve their business. Some of the key initiatives include reorganizing to become more nimble while also reducing our cost structure by $200 million, building concert streaming and direct-to-consumer businesses to expand our revenue streams, advancing our technology initiatives globally while accelerating the shift to digital tickets to meet changing needs of fans, venues, and artists, and reinforcing our balance sheet to endure this period while maintaining a strong position to build our business for the future and act on opportunities as we identify them. such as our recent acquisition of the streaming platform Beeps and continued pipeline bolt-on acquisitions throughout the globe. While this past year has been challenging for the company, our employees, fans, artists, and so many others globally impacted by COVID, I've never been more excited about the opportunities in front of us. We continue to have a substantial tailwind in the live event industry as consumers more than ever are looking to spend on experiences. The supply-demand fundamentals of the concert business remain strong, with artists ready to get back on the road and fans eager to reconnect at events. All our data continues to show that there is substantial pent-up demand for concerts on the consumer demand side. The $2.4 trillion projected surplus in savings in the U.S. alone by June is a key indicator of consumer spending potential. At the same time, surveys demonstrate the high demand for concerts globally, with 95% of fans likely to attend a show when restrictions are lifted. This is proving out fan behavior as well, with 83% of fans continuing to hold on to their tickets with rescheduled shows. On the artist side, there's a broad desire to get back on stage, to connect with their fans, and provide economic support to their bands, crew, and hundreds of others employed each night putting on the show. Given the limited touring activity in 2020 and 21, the pipeline for 2022 is much stronger than usual, with almost twice as many major touring artists on cycle in 2022 than a typical year, about 45 artists versus the usual 25. And there remains plenty of scheduling availability at arenas, amphitheaters, and stadiums to accommodate these additional tours, with over two-thirds of these venue nights unused by sporting events or major concerts in a typical year. It appears that the timing to release the pent up supply and demand is now approaching. Vaccine distributions is accelerating and declines in COVID cases throughout most of the world gives us even more confidence that a safe and meaningful return to shows will soon be possible. For both the US and UK, projections indicate that everyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get one by May or June, and Europe and most other markets following a few months later. Given the mass social and economic toll the lockdown has put on the public, we believe there will be strong momentum to reopen society swiftly as soon as vaccines are ready available, and we believe outdoor activity will be the first to happen. So while the timing of return to life will continue to vary across global markets, every sign points to it beginning safely in many countries sometime this summer and scaling further from there. With that, I will turn the call over to Joe for more detail on our financial results.

Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone. As we did for Q3, We've added some additional tables at the back of our earnings release that reconcile in more detail some of the numbers I will refer to on the call. For the fourth quarter, all the key costs and cash numbers are in line with or better than what we forecasted last quarter. As a result, we are confident that our actions taken to cut costs and increase liquidity will provide us with the runway we need until the time is right to bring shows back. As part of this, We further reduced discretionary spending by another $50 million and closed 2020 with over $950 million in lower costs. We also reduced our cash usage by $1.65 billion relative to our pre-COVID plans, $150 million more than we were projecting last quarter. Looking at our Q4 AOI results, Our AOI loss for the quarter was $244 million, which consisted of $290 million in operational fixed costs and $46 million of contribution margin, which included $96 million contribution from operations along with various one-time items. As we pointed out last quarter, this contribution margin from operations includes our sponsorship business, where we've been able to maintain close to 90% of the commitments that were in place at the end of February last year. Half of this sponsorship moved into 2021, while the portion we retained in 2020 was repurposed into other assets, including streaming concerts. Our artist management and merchandise businesses also generated positive contribution margin in the quarter. Looking at free cash and liquidity, we ended the fourth quarter with $643 million in free cash, which increased to $1.1 billion in early January with our debt raise. This, along with over $950 million of available debt capacity, gives us $2 billion in readily available liquidity. Our total free cash usage in the quarter was $308 million or $103 million per month. We had $97 million per month average in operational burn, plus another $44 million per month of non-operational cash costs to get us to $142 million average per month in gross burn. And then we had $39 million per month in cash contribution margin and ended up with a total effective cash burn of $103 million per month. Now, ticket refunds. The global refund rate for Live Nation concerts that are rescheduled and are in or have gone through a refund window or windows was unchanged from the prior quarter at 17% through the end of Q4. For the tours that have gone through a second refund window, the refund levels were generally much lower for the second window as the casual fans requested their refunds during the first window. Festivals generally cancel their 2020 events, but for festivals where fans could retain their tickets for next year's show, 63% of fans are doing so. On deferred revenue, at the end of the fourth quarter, deferred revenue for events in the next 12 months was $1.5 billion versus the $1.4 billion we projected at the end of Q3, higher due to $100 million in ticket sales during the quarter. Finally, our 2021 outlook, we won't be giving a multi-quarter outlook given the uncertainty on specific timing and likely varied timing for different markets around the world. For Q1, we will remain focused on our cash burn rate and particularly managing our total effective burn rate to ensure cash contribution margin growth outstrips any increases in our cost structure as we start to ramp back up. With that, let's open up the call for any questions for Michael, Kathy, or me. Operator?