Good day everyone, and welcome to the Dave & Buster's Incorporated Fourth Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to Jay Tobin. Please go ahead sir.

Thank you, Dana and thank you all for joining us. On the call today are Steve King, Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Jenkins, Chief Financial Officer. After comments from Mr. King and Mr. Jenkins, we will be happy to take your questions. This call is being recorded on behalf of Dave & Buster's Entertainment Inc. and is copyrighted. Before we begin our discussion of the company's results, I would like to call your attention to the fact that in our remarks and our responses to your questions, certain items may be discussed, which are not based entirely on historical facts. Any such items should be considered forward-looking statements and relating to future events within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Information on the various risk factors and uncertainties has been published in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our website at daveandbusters.com under the Investor Relations section. In addition, our remarks today will include references to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA and store operating income before depreciation and amortization, which are financial measures that are not defined under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Investors should review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP results contained in our earnings announcement released this afternoon, which is also available on our website. Now I'll turn the call over to Steve.

Thank you, Jay and good afternoon everyone. We appreciate your participation in our year end conference call and your continued interest in Dave & Buster's. Today, I'll review the quarterly highlights and provide an update on our current initiatives and plans. Brian will walk through the key financials and initial 2017 guidance and then I'll come back and discuss our development and remodelling efforts before we take your questions. Q4 capped off another strong year for Dave & Buster’s. We surpassed an important milestone as full year sales exceeded $1 billion for the first time. I want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate all of the D&B team members on this accomplishment. Their passion and dedication to the brand is the key reason for our continued success and why I'm more excited today about our future prospects than ever before. Despite a challenging casual dining environment and a calendar shift that proved slightly worse than we expected, D&B’s differentiated experience across our four platforms: eat, drink, play and watch, continued to provide some insulation against these trends during the fourth quarter. We delivered an industry-leading comparable store sales growth of 3.2%, close to the midpoint of our guidance, and our non-comp stores continued to perform exceedingly well. We grew total revenues by more than 15% and operating income by more than 17% during the quarter. Of the 92 stores we operated during the quarter, 26 of those stores or 28% were non-comp stores. Their strong performance demonstrates a broad appeal of our brand as we work towards building out our North American store potential of over 200 stores. I want to point out that during the first full year of operation, our 2015 class of stores generated nearly 52% first year cash on cash return, significantly above our…

Thank you, Steve and good afternoon everyone. Before walking through the numbers, I just want to join Steve in congratulating our many team members across the country. Their tireless commitment to D&B has not only enabled us to surpass the $1 billion in annual sales but also positioned us well as we look forward to our next phase of growth. Now in terms of the fourth quarter, total revenues increased more than 15% to $270.2 million, that's up from $234.2 million in the prior year due to significant contribution from newer stores as well as a healthy performance in our comp store base. Revenues from our 66 comparable stores increased 3.2% to $204 million, that's up from $197.6 million while revenues from our 26 non-comparable stores, including four that opened during the quarter, increased 79% to $68.2 million, that's up from $38.2 million in the prior year. Turning to category sales, the mix shift to our more profitable entertainment business continued as total amusement and other sales grew 19% while food and beverage collectively increased 11%. During the fourth quarter amusement and other represented 53.4% of total revenues reflecting a 170 basis point increase from the prior year period as we continued to feature and to promote the entertainment aspect of our brand. Now breaking down the 3.2% increase in comp sales, our walk-in sales grew 3.5% while our special events business increased 1.7%. In terms of category sales, amusements rose 6.9% while our food and bar business was down 0.4% and 0.9% respectively. We were able to extend our outperformance relative to Knapp Track to 19 consecutive quarters and on a two year stack basis, our comparable store sales growth was 9.2% as we cycled over a strong prior year comp of 6%, including a healthy F&B comp of…

Thank you, Brian. I'd like to review our recent and upcoming store development activities and our remodeling programs. We’re very pleased with the response to our recent store openings. During the fourth quarter we opened four stores, a store in Toledo, Ohio and other in Silver Springs, Maryland near Washington D.C.; Oakville, Ontario which is a suburb of Toronto, and Daly City just outside of San Francisco, for a total of eleven new stores in fiscal year 2016. In 2017 as Brian mentioned we plan to open 11 to 12 new stores which will equate to unit growth of about 12% to 13%. As a reminder, the long term target is for 10% or more new store growth, including a combination of large and small formats. In the first quarter so far we've already opened stores in Carlsbad, California, Columbia, South Carolina and Overland Park, Kansas, and plan to open one additional store in Tucson, Arizona during the first quarter. Including the Tucson store we currently have 6 stores under construction and a total of 26 signed leases. At the same time we're constantly refining our processes to ensure greater efficiency during pre-opening and the first ninety days of opening phases. We remain focused on having buildings and teams that are ready to handle the typically high volume opening week in new stores. Of 11 to 12 new stores planned in 2017, six to seven stores will be in new markets for D&B with the remaining stores located in markets where we already have a brand presence. In terms of square footage, as I’ve said before we continue to use the entire range of between 25,000 and 45,000 square feet, we expect six or seven stores this year to be approximately 40,000 square foot stores, essentially it’s a very large…

[Operator Instructions] And we’ll take our first question from Jake Bartlett with SunTrust.

Great, thanks for taking the question. First, I just want to make sure I understand what's included in your EBITDA guidance. It's different than it had been, so I just want to make sure, I mean, for instance , does it include losses on asset disposals or is this the pure EBITDA as we've got today?

Jake, it’s a pure EBITDA calculation; no add-backs calculated straight off the P&L here. If you look to the press release you'll see a definition of EBITDA in it. So you’re essentially taking net income, adding back interest back to depreciation and amortization.

And then in terms of your same-store sales, one question I've gotten, is what are people doing for food and beverage, they're coming in to play games, how do you explain the differential, the kind of the widening separation of amusement same store sales and then food and beverage same store sales or are people literally just eating before they come or how would you explain that?

I think there's a couple of things. First of all this is not a new trend. This trend -- this gap has existed, every quarter, during the course of this year and even going back before this year. I think there are some macro trends in eating that are having an impact on this, including things like we are seeing more appetizers being purchased as opposed to what one might consider as regular entrees if you will. So I think it’s in part behavioral but I think the entire industry is suffering somewhat pretty sluggish performance as it relates to food and beverage sales now but both negative for the quarter. And I don't think, again that's been fairly consistent over the last couple of quarters. I'm not sure there's really a good explanation for exactly why that is other than less differentiation throughout casual dining and we clearly have a component of our business that imparts that. As we said before we intend to continue to lead with an advertising and promotional message that's focused on amusements. And as such we expect that that's going to be the highest comp contributor again in 2017.

And then looking at your guidance the last two years for same store sales, the initial guidance was, first, 3% to 4%, then 2% to 4%, it’s a little lower this year yet you seem fairly confident in your pipeline of promotions on the gaming side, or the amusement side. Why the somewhat lower outlook this year versus years past, is it -- have you or anything you're seeing year to date trends, I mean what are the drivers?

I think we’ve said consistently that we're going to move towards that longer term guidance which is kind of low single digit comp. And we think this once again is another move slightly towards that longer term guidance. We know we have some headwinds, some of them are stuff inflicted in the form of cannibalization where we're going into existing markets, where we know will have an impact on some of the stores. And we know we have some headwinds from competition and we’re taking that into account in this guidance.

And then lastly you mentioned you have signed leases of 26, is that the same as what you had at the end of the third quarter? I think that’s my count but maybe there's something that’s changed there. My question really is around -- sounds like you have an accelerating number of signed leases of 26 versus 19 last year, yet the pace of your unit growth is not increasing that much. So I am just trying to assess what the increase in signed leases could mean for the actual number of unit growth that you're going to eventually open?

I think it’s greater visibility and clarity into our pipeline. We clearly can see well into 2018 what we expect to open and even into -- many of the stores that we think will open in 2019.

And we'll take our next question from Nicole Miller with Piper Jaffray.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Two quick questions. How should we expect the cadence of the comp to be throughout the year? In prior years you did have tough compares or volatile compares. But as you move towards the longer term range, perhaps things would be more smooth, so taking into account the current tough -- maybe what are the pluses and minuses as you enter and as you exit the year, please?

First of all, we're not guiding quarterly comps. So just to be clear on that, I think you do point out that we did have some things that we rolled over in the course of the last year that we called out that were -- may create some volatility from a quarter to quarter basis but we’re really not guiding quarterly comps.

And when you look back in that last year, and you had I think one or two extra weeks of marketing, do you have a couple of extra weeks you could throw in this year? And then you did comment on the box office which I think is interesting. I think there's something like four times the family films coming this year; would you tie in with games or would you potentially -- and I know you don't want to get specific for competitive reasons but would you potentially also tie in food and beverage like you did last fiscal year? Thank you.

I guess the direct answer there is yes. We plan to tie in with some movies this year, we already have those arranged. As I mentioned we want those to be announced in conjunction with when we roll out the games and those movie titles are coming out but we do have some of those already arranged. And we will have some food and beverage that are connected, that more beverage than on the food side, it's really easier for us to execute that.

On the -- you asked a question about media, I think also. We have indicated that we extended our media weeks over the course of this year, added some weeks as Steve mentioned in the fourth quarter. At this point we are not really planning on additional media week next year, and I don’t think about sort of same number of media weeks, so we're back in little bit of a leverage kind of situation again, which is a good thing.

And we'll take our next question from Sharon Zackfia with William Blair.

A couple of quick questions. On the other operating expenses in the quarter, I think the first quarter that I can remember you kind of deleveraging that. And I know you called out marketing and insurance. I was just wondering if you could give us some more insight on what happened on the insurance side and whether that was expected or if there was something unusual there?

On the second and third quarter when we gave our guide, we indicated that we’d be thinking about sort of -- of the implied margins in the fourth quarter, implied sort of flat margins and that’s exactly kind of what we had here. And we saw pressure on labor and we sort of indicated that the wage rates are hovering around 5% for us and we have more and more of these non-comps, 26 on that in the year that’s putting pressure on the labor front, 40 bp of margin decline and in reference to the higher insurance claims or higher insurance costs that's really -- we're self-funded on both geo [ph] workers' comp. So it’s really a situation where -- it was less favorable than prior years. We typically have enjoyed some favorable reserve adjustments with our actuary in the fourth quarter, it was just a little less favorable, still lower than the average quarter, it's just not quite as favorable as the past. So that situation, and as I mentioned marketing, because we added additional weeks, we de-leveraged on marketing, about 30 bp, typically we leverage on the marketing side. So that two investments, in terms of advertising in the fourth quarter and that put some pressure on the margin as well.

So when you think about 2017 I don't know if you expect that 5% labor inflation to continue; is that a good number to use for 2017? And if so, kind of what comp do you think you would need to kind of hold that line item?

Well I think if you look at our guide, we’re in general guiding toward a flattish type margins next year, the EBITDA is implied a sort of flat. So the things that helped fuel the significant margin improvement this year, which was about 200 basis points for us, in terms of EBITDA margin expansion, some of those things are going away, cost of goods, we had significant fuel from e-ticket early on and commodity deflation, we were improved by about 90 basis points just on that this year. We're now talking about sort of flattish commodity cost and we're rolling -- we've completely rolled over e-tickets, so there's not a whole lot of margin expansion on the cost of sales front. We do anticipate labor to move to the negative side next year. So it's a pressure point to our P&L moving into 2017, largely on the heels of wage rate. That said, we expect wage rates to moderate a little bit, we were near 5% this year for the full year, California, New York, are the two states that we expect to have less pressure in, because we're not seeing the same kind of minimum wage increase. New York had a 50% increase last year and California right about half as much as last year. So we're getting a little bit of moderation on the wage rate in our view. But we still think it's going to be a pressure point above what we've seen in the history of this company, so it’s going to be a pressure point. And then we do anticipate next year to see higher occupancy costs, facility costs as we have this non-comp base that’s growing. And the rents of today are not the rents of our legacy old -- older stores. So -- and we're getting great returns on them. We think it’s the story, so we're going to keep building them, keep seeking for these big high returns but it does put pressure on the margin profile the company and that's why we're basically projecting sort of flattish overall margins. Where we have pressures G&A and marketing expect to leverage next year.

And then just one last question on cannibalization, I don't remember if you, Brian, mentioned that or Steve, is the cannibalization plan for 2017, is that kind of similar to past years, will it be expected to be higher, is it something more in the back half versus the first half? Any kind of insight into the cannibalization would be helpful.

I think as Steve mentioned, we were skewed this year -- the 2016 class stores, new markets and it was a bigger issue -- cannibalization was a bigger issue early in 2016 because of really more or so the 2015 class which was for the most part, all of those 2015 class stores opened -- they were opened in the existing markets, so we saw pressure early into 2016 from that. The 2017 class profile looks a heck of a lot like the 2016 class. So I'm not sure that we see a significant difference moving into 2017 on the cannibalization front.

And we'll take our next question from Andrew Strelzik with BMO Capital Markets.

Just my first question; would you be willing to quantify the impact of the calendar shift that you mentioned? And also we've been hearing a lot about tax refunds and potentially Easter shifts, how should we think about that as we go in to this year?

Well, let me take the second one first. So the good news with the way our quarter falls is everything falls in the first quarter. But clearly the tax shift was a noticeable event in terms of that delay. Again theoretically this all should come out in Washington in the course of the quarter. And kind of we'll see what the impact of a later Easter by three weeks is when we get to the end of the quarter. We have not forecast that as any kind of big headwind for the quarter, it's just really a timing difference of when things come to us. And then the question on last --

I think it was a question on calendar shifts. I don't know that we want to -- there's a lot of -- little art around trying to figure out the calendar shift. I would just say this -- as we look at how December and November numbers -- I'm sorry December and January performance ran for us, the calendar shift did hurt us by more than we anticipated. And the flip side was -- also we had the weather impact. So we did roll over storm Jonas, I think we pointed out last year that was about a 1.1% hit to us. So we had really two things happening for us, in the fourth quarter we actually rolled over and actually had a good net weather situation, wasn’t quite the one wants, because we had some winter storms this year as well. But the calendar shift was higher than the weather, good guy. So it was the net, between the two, the calendar shift and weather there was a drag on performance in the quarter.

And then with respect to the guidance, I guess if I look at the low end of the EBITDA guidance and then the low end of the net income guidance, I am having a little bit of trouble bridging the two. Is there something abnormal in terms of the rate of increase either in D&A or maybe even you’re baking in something on the interest expense side that might be throwing that off or is that just a mean issue?

Well, I think if you -- our guide does assume a store differential, for one. So it can drive changes to pre-opening or what would be in the EBITDA guide, so that's okay, but it would -- could change depreciation like numbers and could affect our effective tax rate as well. Chip credits, essentially are -- could be a flat number, so the effective rate of tax can vary depending on the range of operating performance also. So there are some changes that can happen between EBITDA and net income you need to think about. We have one less store depreciation that would be lower on the low end of this case.

If I could squeeze one more in, I just wanted to know about the plans for share purchase, and deploying the capital to share purchase. Obviously free cash flow is growing, you did a little bit of it this year. Are there any thoughts around doing more than just dilution, getting a little bit more constructive on that side in terms of capital deployment?

I think it's a topic that we are regularly discussing with our board is, kind of what is the right level of leverage for this company, what is the right amount of return to shareholders, et cetera. We don't have anything to share today.

We’ll take our next question from Brian Vaccaro with Raymond James.

I just wanted to start with a couple of questions on the comps. Steve, obviously there's a lot of volatility for the broader industry through the period. But can you speak to the underlying trends that you think you saw through the quarter? I am trying to parse out the multitude of weather and calendar shifts and incremental marketing weeks – just give us some sense of the cadence for the quarter.

I'm sorry, I missed that very last piece, the sense of the cadence through the quarter --

Yes, just the monthly cadence for the quarter as you see your business sort of trending for the quarter. I think last quarter you mentioned “you were off to a good start” but just curious, sort of color on the monthly cadence as the quarter progressed, trying to parse through all these calendar shifts et cetera.

I think to Brian’s -- first of all I don't think that -- I would characterize the month to month to month within the quarter as not meaningful because of all the various shifts that we've already talked about. So the holiday shift was clearly depressing this December, you know that Jonas was favorable for January, and we talked about all those things. So I would say in general that we felt like again -- to Brian’s point, aside from the fact that we probably underestimated the severity of the impact from the two holidays ending up on the weekend. And again it was not a huge miss, we underestimated that a little bit. The quarter pretty much came as we expected it.

And Brian, you mentioned the impact of competition, I think you said, moderated in the fourth quarter, how are you thinking about that, everything you know about what that competitive landscape looks like? Or how are you thinking about that as the tail or the headwinds to your business as you move into 2017, is it similar to where it’s been getting little worse or where it’s getting little better and how are you thinking about that directionally?

That’s a good question. I mean obviously we've talked about TopGolf and Main Event in the past. Both of those brands opened up quite a few stores in 2016, most of them in our market, between the two of them they opened 16 stores in our fiscal year, 13 of those were in our market. So we definitely are seeing them, they are growing that directionally a combined rate of about 35% unit growth. So a pretty aggressive growth, I would say TopGolf appears to have not opened quite as many stores as they originally anticipated. I think they opened seven, I think early in the year we were thinking they were going to open 10, just a little bit. So we definitely see them growing in the mid 30% range right now. We sort of see the same estimates moving into 2017, so kind of 35% growth on a combined basis. So I'm not sure it represents more drag -- and we expect most of those are going to be in our markets when you look at the list that we see. So they’re going to be in our DMAs. We're going to feel them. I am not sure, at a higher rate than what we see right now but we'll see. We talked before, we're curious about the honeymoon in particular TopGolf and how they do in year two, and year three and whether we call back on them over time. So and their recent acceleration is -- well their acceleration of store growth is fairly recent. So I think that's yet to be seen. So right now we're not necessarily thinking it's going to be a whole lot worse unless we see them really start to accelerate their pace up in the 40% plus, from what we see on TopGolf as I mentioned that may be harder, easier said than done so.

And you mentioned 10 -- I think the 10 units that will be entering the comp base this year. Any change in the impact on your comp trends based on the units that will be entering the comp base versus the impact that there has been on your comps?

No, I mean as we've said before, I mean we adjust our comp base once a year, the beginning of the year, so stores 18 months or -- that has been opened 18 months or more when we move it into the comp base. We're really -- that’s really trying to get by this honeymoon period we talked about which is January 1, 26 weeks of operation of the store. So we don't really anticipate that when stores move into the comp set that is going to have some undue drag or influence on our overall comp performance. It’s possible I think that, you might have a week or two but in terms of anything material we don’t anticipate any significant drag on cost.

And then just last one, in terms of your guidance and the impact of the extra weeks, I know you said it's a little bit of a below average sales week, or that’s your expectation. But can you give us -- can you quantify either the EBITDA or EPS impact that you expect for the year or what’s embedded in your guidance?

Yes, you could take -- the guidance range we've provided, obviously divided by 53 weeks you're going to get a number. What I was trying to say in my comments is that we would expect that 53rd week to be lower than average because of the fact that Super Bowl Sunday is -- happens to be that 53rd week, so in that Sunday, while it’s better than past Super Bowls, before we had D&B Sports, it is a depressed day of at-home viewing day for that sporting event. So it’s a slower than average Sunday, in a pretty significant way. And then from a margin perspective, the way I would think about that is when you look at our overall EBITDA at, what, 23.8% or whatever it is for the year, you're going to need a fully load that 53rd week with all fixed costs, operating costs of the business. So you’re not going to get -- you're going to have G&A, rent, occupancy, all elements of the P&L in it. And since it's a lower than average week, you're going to -- it’s going to be a lower than average margin, that’s the way I would think about that.

And you also included an extra week of depreciation as well?

Everything, everything. GAAP accounting.

[Operator Instructions] We’ll go next to Steve Anderson with Maxim Group.

Yes good afternoon and thank you for pointing out some of the regional differences. I want to get a little bit more color on that, you said that Texas seemed a little bit slow. First question is, are those stores comping positively and have you noticed any other regional differences on your footprint?

First of all, there are regional differences. Most of the regional differences tend to get driven for us at this point by. Weather, although I think we called out on our last call that the ones that were not particularly subject to weather like California and Florida were doing well for us. More specifically than that, we haven't said a lot -- Texas was very close to the average in the third quarter, it fell off quite a bit actually in the fourth quarter and was a negative for the quarter. End of Q&A

And gentlemen at this time I'd like to turn the call back to you for any additional or closing remarks.

Well, once again we want to thank you for your participation in today's call and we look forward to sharing our first quarter results with you in early June. Have a good afternoon.

Thank you and that does conclude today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.