Adam Aron
Analyst · B. Riley & Co. Please go ahead
Thank you, John. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us this morning for a review of AMC's results for the second quarter of 2019 and a progress update on several key initiatives in support of achieving the product, customer engagement and financial targets we laid out for you at our Investor and Analyst Day in April of 2019. The second quarter of 2019 was a superb one for AMC. We posted strong above-consensus results for the quarter. And later during this call today, I'll be announcing new positive actions looking forward that you may not be expecting and of which we are quite proud. Let's start with a look at the industry's impressive performance in the second quarter and AMC's outperformance well ahead of the pack over the same period. The domestic industry box office for the second quarter of 2019 came in as you know at $3.2 billion, which was 34.2% higher than Q1 of 2019. Reading all the articles from journalists who continually seem to be obsessed by how streaming concepts can or cannot co-exist with brick-and-mortar movie theaters, it would be easy to miss that not only was 2018 a record year for AMC and a record year for moviegoing generally, but also that Q2 of 2019 represents the second largest quarter for domestic movie theater revenues of all time. Let me say that again. Over the 400 calendar quarters, over the last 100 years, the domestic industry box office for Q2 of 2019 was the second best quarter ever. Not the second best Q2, the second best quarter of all of them. Admittedly, this year's second quarter industry revenue performance was 3.7% shy of last year's Q2, but remember that that quarter Q2 of 2018 was itself up 23% over Q2 of the year prior and was the single highest quarter in cinema history. Indeed the domestic industry box office in Q2 of 2019 was fully 19% higher than that of Q2 2017 and fully 15% higher than that of Q2 2016. Why was Q2 2019 such a smash hit? All studios contributed and often with a welcome return of a greater number of family-friendly films in the quarter. But special praise must go to Disney for Avengers: Endgame. In the U.S., April was the highest grossing April ever and May was the second highest grossing May ever thanks to the formidable strength of Avengers: Endgame now standing at $2.8 billion globally the highest grossing film ever. In Europe too the industry box office showed real strength in the second quarter of 2019 up 16.6% in the countries served by Odeon and up 11.1% in the countries served by Nordic on a constant currency basis. It's not just that Q2 looked good. Already in the third quarter the industry is off to a great start. Sony's Spider-Man: Far From Home and Disney's, The Lion King helped drive the domestic industry box office for July to be some 6.7% ahead of last year's July. And as you know, just three weeks into its run The Lion King is already the second largest movie of the year. All in all the cadence of the industry box office in 2019 is tracking exactly as we at AMC predicted, a weak first quarter followed by what we believe will be an impressive stretch in quarters two, three and four. It's a cadence that we previously noted. 2019 is expected to be a back-end-weighted year culminating in what we believe will be an exciting fourth quarter to end the year large. As always, while we were especially encouraged by the industry performance in April May and July of 2019 and optimistic for the balance of the year, it's important to remember that there are natural fluctuations in the box office between weeks, months, and quarters within the year, due to the timing of film releases. Our management team tends to focus on our full year results and our performance against our medium- and long-term financial targets rather than on any particular film or intra-year time frame. We would encourage you to do the same. Now, let's turn to AMC's strong performance with our second quarter results. I've just reviewed how very pleased we were with the industry box office performance in Q2, but what matters more to us than anything else is our delivering solid results within our own company at AMC. This is why we're even more pleased to be taking you through AMC's Q2 results. In U.S. markets AMC had an excellent quarter outperforming the industry once again. AMC set a new record in U.S. attendance, up 3.1% this quarter to nearly 72 million theater visits. And for the fifth consecutive quarter AMC handily outperformed the rest of the industry the rest of the industry being defined as the approximate 75% of the industry that excludes AMC. On an attendance per screen basis AMC beat the rest of the U.S. industry by approximately 800 basis points. Can I repeat that statistic? We beat the pack by some 800 basis points. That attendance growth came from conscious decisions on our part which we widely discussed starting last June, July and August to create incremental demand by driving attendance through marketing programs like A-List and Discount Tuesdays among others. Even with a modest intentional sacrifice on pricing per ticket with such a substantial attendance gain we still also outperformed the industry on an admissions revenue per screen basis by approximately 400 basis points. Market share has been moving our way and AMC's continued outperformance is clear evidence that our carefully crafted strategic initiatives and customer engagement are working. The story is similar in our international markets. Not only were the industry revenues strong because of Avengers: Endgame and the large family-friendly slate but AMC performed very well internationally too with attendance up a whopping 16.6% year-over-year in the second quarter. On a consolidated basis AMC generated $1.506 billion of total revenues an increase of 4.4% compared to last year, and up 6.0% on a constant currency basis. We also set a global attendance record this quarter of 97 million guests, up 6.3% versus the year ago quarter. Notably, we continue to see strong growth in concession spend in our theaters with second quarter consolidated food and beverage revenues per patron growing 3.9% to $5.08, or up 5.1% on a constant currency basis and eclipsing the $5 threshold on a consolidated basis for the first time in AMC's company history. Food and beverage revenues in the United States increased to $5.58 per patron, which was an all-time high for AMC. For sure, we're spreading our food and beverage expertise to Europe where food and beverage spend at Odeon and Nordic theaters was impressive with per patron revenue growing by 9.1% quarter-over-quarter, to an all-time high on a constant currency basis. In addition to our ongoing food and beverage initiatives, this strength was supported by strategic pricing actions taken back in 2018 and again in 2019 and a food and beverage friendly slate of G and PG-rated films in the current quarter. As we've said previously while we tend to outsell all other mass cinema operators. We believe that, we are still in the early to middle innings, of capturing increased food and beverage opportunities. And expect to continue improving food and beverage spend, in both the United States and in Europe, over the coming years. Accordingly, as a result of achieving company-wide attendance records and strong food and beverage spend growth, also record setting, AMC generated second quarter total adjusted EBITDA of $237.6 million, which is up 7.3% from the year ago quarter, and up 8.6%, on a constant currency basis, adjusted for the impact of ASC 842. Furthermore, this year-over-year growth is even more impressive, when you remember that Q2 of 2018 last year, benefited from a $10.8 million rent adjustment related to a lease modification that did not recur, this year. So, in Q2 of 2019, AMC generated $100.1 million of adjusted free cash flow, up 68% year-over-year, after adjusting, for ASC 842 in the year ago quarter. Our strength in particular attendance growth is being driven by a combination, of our experiential theater initiatives and enhancements, innovative use of technology and smart promotional pricing globally. Deserving a particular mention, in the United States, AMC is reaping enormous benefit from the popularity of our website and smartphone apps, currently on a pace to be visited some one billion times annually, our voluminous outbound moviegoer communications, currently at a pace of around 1.5 billion outbound customer communications annually and our AMC Stubs loyalty program, now reaching more than 21 million U.S. member households, which include our new A-list subscription tier of AMC Stubs. As we've noted during our Investor and Analyst Day, in April and in previous earnings calls this combination forms what we call the AMC platform, by delivering a personalized and targeted index and experience for our guests, leveraging modern technology interfaces, data-driven insights, innovative consumer engagement practices. And a state-of-the-art theater experience. We're creating a positive flywheel effect that encourages incremental attendance. And ultimately drives incremental value for our customers, for our studio partners and for AMC. Looking in the rearview mirror, that is our second quarter report. Before moving on to some AMC news that we will make today, as we look at the volatility in AM's share price over the past few months, we would like to call out to you yet again, the new lease accounting standard, ASC 842. As all of you know on May 8, we reported our first quarter results, which for the first time included the impact of ASC 842, on lease accounting. Those impacts, which were all non-cash, include among other things, the capitalization of our operating leases, onto our balance sheets, as operating right-of-use assets and operating lease liabilities. The guidance from FASB was clear. These operating leases were operating in nature and not to be considered as debt. Unfortunately, and as many on this call have already noted in your thinking and in your reports, the financial data provider services, including by name Bloomberg Capital IQ and FactSet in our view, erroneously categorize these operating leases as debt. Given the importance of these data providers, often serving as the primary source of truth, for algorithmic trading platforms, as well as for traditional human asset managers, this caused significant confusion in the marketplace. What's more, what we believe is this mistaken reporting by these data services, made it appear, that the 842 impact doubled our reported debt literally overnight. Even though there was no corresponding adjustment to our cash flows, no change in our interest obligations and no change to our adjusted EBITDA. But the services made it appear that our leverage ratio increased again literally overnight from about 5 times to over 12times. Additionally their misreporting an increase in our debt had the optical and erroneous impact of inflating our total enterprise value and consequently, our valuation models. In other words, as viewed on the data streams of these providers, AMC became wildly over-levered. And AMC shares became stunningly expensive, all this despite no change in cash, no change in interest payments and no change in the operations, of AMC's business. This is not a problem unique to AMC, as ASC 842 has broad impact across industries, but we have been unnecessarily and significantly impacted. As you would expect, we have been in contact with the various data providers seeking that they rectify their reporting. Based on our conversations, it seems clear that they are in fact intent on resolving these issues. That said, any fix will take time as it impacts not only AMC, but also thousands of other public companies. In the meantime before our corrections can be reported correctly, we would encourage investors to take one of two approaches when looking at AMC's leverage and valuation ratios to ensure like-for-like comparisons: either, debt excluding operating leases should be compared to our reported adjusted EBITDA or debt including operating leases should be compared to our reported adjusted EBITDA plus adding back on top to EBITDA our rent expense. I would now like to call your attention to seven specific AMC strategies and developments that deserve to be highlighted. First, let's start with A-List. And as we have done over the past year giving you each quarter, a fairly specific update, we have just now lapped the 1-year anniversary of the program which launched on June 26 2018. As of yesterday, we had more than 900,000 A-List members. That's about 300,000 members who've joined in 2019 since we instituted a considerable price increase and more than 100,000 new members since we last spoke on the first quarter conference call back in May. Compared to our initial 12 month goal of 500,000 members we have far exceeded our own and all expectations. As for the frequency of moviegoing by A-Listers, you'll recall that in the first quarter of 2019 A-Listers averaged seeing 2.6 movies per month in admittedly a slow box office quarter. With the second quarter domestic box office being some 34% bigger than that of Q1 some observers feared that A-List frequency might similarly rise by 34% in Q2 to about 3.5 visits per month. It should be no surprise therefore that we are pleased to inform you that average A-List frequency in Q2 of 2019 was only 2.85 visits per month, actually 2.848 visits per month to be precise. We really do watch and analyze this program like a hawk. This frequency of 2.848 was well within our profitability sweet spot of between 2.5 and 3.0 visits per member per month. Importantly, these frequency levels combined with both bring-along attendance at full ticket prices and food and beverage spending on a significant increase in overall moviegoing as A-List has clearly stimulated demand. Accordingly per our previous commentaries, we continue and have increasing confidence but firmly believe that the A-List program is driving incremental attendance for AMC and that this is one of the reasons, we are considerably outpacing the industry's attendance growth. We similarly believe and have increasing confidence that A-List is already contributing to AMC's overall profitability in 2019. I should note that we are aware that after spotting AMC a 13-month first-mover advantage, one of our competitors Regal has finally launched a competitive program. We have -- we fully expected them to do so and are not concerned by their effort. Second, at the end of June starting with the clever University movie entitled Yesterday we introduced Artisan Films at AMC, a marketing effort by our company to highlight and promote more specialized movies. With Artisan Films, we are curating and then promoting a collection of intriguing cinema products that might get lost in an era where blockbuster movies are deservedly grabbing considerable attention and headlines. At AMC, we believe that a wide array of storytellers are making great movies and we are focused on supporting their voices and on selling tickets to their films when they play at our theaters. Indeed, we play hundreds of movies across the AMC footprint each year and more of them will be more successful because of the extra love and attention that Artisan Films will offer. Third, speaking of blockbuster movies, on August 2 that would be last week, AMC started testing a new pricing initiative that will actually charge a small premium for select movies that are of the highest appeal to moviegoers, and which would appear to have the highest consumer demand. Specifically, at 30 AMC theaters, across all three of our brands, in four cities; Boston, Columbus, Indianapolis and San Diego, we are test marketing a $0.50, a $1 and $1.50 per ticket surcharge for a handful of high-demand blockbusters. Think of it being applied, say, to one or two movie titles each month. Just as a couple of years ago, we instituted higher pricing on weekend days and lower prices on Tuesdays, this again is basic economic theory that goes back to the first microeconomics course we all might have taken in college. Charge more in peak periods and charge more for high-demand products, but charge less in the off-peak. These pricing strategies have been commonplace across our European theaters for years, and industry observers have talked about this idea coming to the United States also for years. Moving from mere talk, at AMC, we are trying it right now in the United States to determine consumer response. I should point out though that our A-Listers and Stubs members, who are Discount Tuesdays guests, will be exempt from these not only higher ticket prices giving even more value to these two programs should the concept be rolled out more broadly across the country if the test market is successful. Fourth, we are very close to reaching final agreement on a concept that we have been working on for more than two years. Starting this fall, we hope and expect to be able to broadcast live sporting events, a meaningful number of games on weekend the afternoons, at a select number of theaters, across the country at AMC, across all three of our brands, from one of the four major professional sports leagues. Again, if consumers respond favorably to seeing live sports broadcasts on, say, a 30-foot or 40-foot screen, as we think they certainly will, this could be the start of considerably more live sports programming at AMC. Fifth, as you'll recall from our Investor and Analyst Day in April, we provided medium to long-term financial targets as a helpful framework for thinking about our opportunity over time. We set out a goal for you then to improve AMC's operating margins by up to 200 basis points and we asked you to hold our management team accountable to deliver improving and increasing margins. Accordingly, we are announcing today, the launch of a formal profit improvement plan that will go into effect essentially immediately ramping up such that while there would be only modest impact in 2019, we believe we can add $50 million or more to AMC's operating income in 2020. Specifically, we have identified about $25 million of ideas in possible revenue enhancements and some $50 million of ideas in possible cost savings. Some ideas are big and some ideas are small. But together they add up. While most of the ideas will be realized, some will not. Some of you may wonder, why now. Is there any specific significance to our aggressively going after revenue enhancements and cost containments? Actually, any time and all the time is a good time for a company to think creatively about its revenues and its costs, and we signaled to you earlier this year that we are serious about increasing our margin delivery. Think of us as a leaner, but not a meaner AMC. This is a healthy exercise for organizations to undergo every few years and will improve our overall operating efficiency at AMC as well as our baseline margin profile. Sixth, AMC has been saying for years now that our capital allocation strategy has been to continually balance amongst three competing and conflicting objectives. Choice one: Reinvest capital back into the business to drive growth. We've done this hyper aggressively in recent years, renovating more theaters with recliner seats; more theaters with premium large-format screens; and more theaters with enhanced food and both hard and soft beverage options than anyone else. Indeed, we have reinvested more than $2 billion back into our theaters since 2014. Choice two: Return cash to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks. Again since 2014, the time of AMC's first dividend as a publicly traded company, we have returned well over $1 billion to shareholders, including among other methods through meaningful open-market buybacks and our paying a handsome and unchanged regular quarterly dividend for 21 consecutive quarters, including an announcement on Monday just of this week that our dividend policy has continued unchanged once again. We see no change to that dividend strategy anytime soon. Choice three; hold on to our cash, thereby lowering net debt and as a result deleveraging. While we have the option to actually pay down certain debt instruments, we would note that we have already proactively managed our balance sheet to ensure financial strength and flexibility, such that we currently have no maturities for the next five years, which is a significant advantage for AMC. Again, at our Investor Day in April, we addressed that deleveraging has become our single highest current priority in the allocation of capital. Accordingly, we are updating and issuing new net CapEx guidance for 2019 and for 2020 respectively. You'll recall that 2018 net CapEx was approximately $460 million and that we initially guided 2019 net CapEx to be around $450 million. We now believe it'd be more prudent for our 2019 net CapEx to be in the neighborhood of approximately $415 million, 4-1-5, an approximate $35 million reduction for calendar year 2019. More importantly, though, we are currently driving our net capital expenditure budget for 2020 to be approximately $300 million, a $150 million reduction over the recent guidance for 2019. We have not yet set a target for 2021 or 2022 net CapEx, but this all is consistent with our saying at the April Investor and Analyst Day, that we wanted to bring down total net CapEx to $250 million to $300 million over a three to five-year time period. Even with our lowered CapEx budget, adding in landlord contributions, there still will be ample monies in 2020 for maintenance capital, as well as to invest in growth, funding technology initiatives, further premium large-format screen development, more food and beverage initiatives and importantly to go after high-return growth projects and renovating theaters across Europe, but especially in the United Kingdom, as well as adding new build theaters in the United States, in Europe and in the Middle East. Fortunately, we are after all nearing the completion of a significant time cycle of reinvestment domestically, which organically lessens the capital need at home. Theater renovation projects in the U.S. will not stop per se, but with so many U.S. theaters already having been done recently, gradually monies are reducing, as to the quantity of U.S. theaters being addressed starting in 2020 and in the years ahead. Not only does this decreased CapEx spending help us to deleverage, it also will have the effect of increasing the magnitude of the adjusted free cash flow that AMC is actually generating. We are aware of a mild debate over the years among some shareholders, questioning how much of our current capital expenditure investments had been for maintenance purposes versus how much had been for growth. Finally, in 2020 that question should be off the table and end any doubt. And finally, the seventh bit of news. I'm pleased to welcome Ambassador Philip Lader and Adam Sussman to the AMC Board of Directors. Ambassador Lader is the former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's which for you non-diplomatic officials is the United Kingdom. He's also the former longtime Chairman of WPP in the U.K., the world's largest network of advertising and marketing agencies. His career is marked by abundance of business and diplomatic success and he brings with him a global perspective that we believe will be particularly insightful for our European operations, which are headquartered in London. Adam Sussman having served as the Chief Digital Officer of Nike, allows us to leverage his significant expertise building digital experiences to help accelerate AMC's efforts to further engage our guests through technology. Both Phil and Adam have attended their inaugural Board meetings, both telephonically and in person. And no surprise, each are already making contributions to the company. I'm also pleased to note that with their appointments, the majority of AMC's Board is now comprised of independent directors. In summary AMC had a terrific second quarter and we have exciting innovative plans and actions under way that will improve our company's operating performance as we look ahead, all the while ensuring that the AMC platform continues to deliver the best moviegoing experience for our guests and puts AMC clearly at the top and in the lead as the clear and undisputed leader among movie theater circuits around the world. With that, operator, we're ready to take questions.