Stephen A. Wynn
Analyst · Cameron McKnight with Wells Fargo
Our retail numbers. Dig this. We have 52,000 square feet of retail in that hotel. It's going to 60,000. It's in the process of going to 60,000, but we have 52,000 at year end. We did over $1 billion in sales, and our rents were in excess of $120 million in a 52,000-foot store, group of stores. I mean, such numbers are unheard of. This -- the yield per foot is in excess of $20,000 a foot. We're at $40,000 at the -- we've got numbers of around $40,000 at Louis Vuitton, Chanel. And each of our stores, I have been told, represents either the best store in the world that they have or the highest yield per foot in the world that they enjoy or the #1 store in Asia that they have. And it goes on and on that way. It's extraordinary. Yes, in April, we opened up and doubled this. Louis Vuitton last year did $115 million in 2,850 feet. They just doubled this. We gave them the Tiffany space of 2,000 feet because Tiffany moved across the hall. And now Louis Vuitton, for the last 30-odd days, has got twice the store, and you still can't get it the place. We have to put stanchions in the hallway outside the doors to observe fire code occupancy levels within the space of the store. Now if you observe this in person, I don't know if you've been to Macau, it's quite something to see and even more puzzling to explain, except this -- and I offer this as an explanation about everything in China. If I can take a minute, I'm going to -- I have to give a little background to my comment. But I -- I'm welcoming this opportunity to share this with people who invest in my company and who cover gaming. People say that the Chinese people have an almost genetic predisposition to gamble. And I want to say that, that is not my opinion. My father, my grandfather came to America in the late 1890s along with all the other Europeans through Ellis Island impoverished, seeking a better life, worked for anything they could get and had children around 1915 and 1916, before World War I, and they had nothing. And those children mostly -- Frank Sinatra was born in 1915, my -- and Dean Martin, both of my parents were born in '16 -- none of them graduated high school, I think, to speak of. And they never had a good day. They were too young for World War I. They went off to fight in World War II or work in defense industries. But they came of age in the Great Depression, and that generation of Americans that are the parents of the baby boomers basically hadn't seen a good day in their life until after World War II in 1945. And they came home to bump into the greatest period of expansion in American history. And they worked hard and they were entrepreneurial, and they got a taste of the good life. And they were the first ones in all of their family trees to have anything like disposable income of any size. And what did they want? Cadillacs, diamond rings, mink stoles. They want to go to Miami, they wanted to see casinos, they wanted to see Frank Sinatra and Abbott & Costello and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. They wanted the good life because they had heard about it and dreamt about it, and for the first time in life, they could find and experience the good life. Casino gambling is colorful and dramatic and theatrical. It was part of the good life. And that generation, my father, my ex-wife's dad, they were all gamblers. They shot crap and bet baseball and football and were rather cavalier about their income for a solid reason: they made it themselves. Money was whatever they thought it was because they created their own wealth or their own income. And if they wanted to dispose of it in a way that other people might think was a little free, too bad because they could always go and make more. At least that's the way they thought in their heads. Well, let's take a -- and so that generation gambled. The second generation of that family, guys like myself, the baby boomers, had a slightly different -- we had the benefit of their -- our parents sending us to college. We were more sophisticated, in a manner of speaking, and our tastes ran differently than our parents and maybe gambling wasn't a priority. Different things became important. Think of China today. Nobody had any money before 35 or 40 years ago. It's all new money. What you're seeing is an explosion of pent-up demand for the good life. And so you want a real Louis Vuitton bag, you want a real Kelly bag from Hermes or the Birkin bag. You want a real Louis Vuitton or Chanel. You don't -- we've got a Rolex store that must be 500 or 600 square feet, does $80-odd thousand a day. And yet across the border in Zhuhai about 10 minutes away, you can buy what looks like a Rolex for $0.01 on a dollar. But they don't want any parts of the Lindy, the fake, the copy. They want the real thing. And that's the only logical explanation for what we're seeing in retail sales. And it also spills over and explains why men who've made their way in the world and made their own money feel that they have a right to play baccarat if they damn well feel like it. Now second generations have a different mentality and a different sensibility, and that shows up in Hong Kong as well. The sons of some of these people don't gamble as much. But Hong Kong and China are making millionaires and new money at a rate that the world has never seen before. So I don't see this diminishing the supply of people that want to have the good life. And that means that our job is to provide it for them. End of presentation.