Matt Maddox
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is open
Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today for our third quarter conference call. I'd like to get started talking about Macau. In the third quarter, in Macau, we generated $301 million of EBITDA. However, we had a hold impact from our direct business of approximately $22 million. We held negative 1% at Wynn Palace in our direct program and 1.2% in our direct program at Wynn Macau. The way the direct programs are structured, you pay commission on turnover not on win loss, so when you have abnormally low hold, that revenue mix significantly impacts EBITDA and that was a $22 million impact in Macau. VIP continued to compress and we did see some customer trial out at Cotai with some of the newer product at both City of Dreams and MGM, but I believe and we all believe that that is quite temporary. Mass continued to grow. We maintained our share in mass market and slots at 14%. And I'm pleased to say that while the VIP trends and the mass trends continued into October, we generated over $4 million a day of EBITDA during the month of October, driven largely by an 8% growth in our mass drop during that month. Moving onto Las Vegas. We've continued to see the positive momentum that we experienced in the first quarter. We had $13 million impact and hold in our baccarat business in Las Vegas. But if you take a look at the strategy and the way that we made the pivot to focus on taking market share in the domestic business, casino business and in slots, it is working and Marilyn and the team are doing a great job. We had 9% growth in our domestic table games drop and as well as 9% growth in slot handle during the quarter. Our hotel revenues grew by 5% during the quarter and retail is continuing to really gain traction as it was up over double digits in revenue growth during the quarter. The Las Vegas strategy is working and we're really excited about 2020. Moving on to Boston, at Encore Boston Harbor first I'd like to congratulate Brian Gullbrants as the new property president. He's been with us for over a decade and I know and we all know that he is the exact right person to lead that project. We've been opened for 136 days in Boston and we're learning each and every day how to become more local. We've been tweaking our food and beverage product to make sure we're giving the customers what they want. We've been working on our messaging and we now have new messaging out to the market. We are going to the first time in our company's history in North America launch a loyalty card tiered card program and that will be launching in Boston in the first quarter. And I'm sure as all of you that are very familiar with our business now that tier card program is essential in a regional marketing in a regional property. Our table games business in Boston and our hotel business has actually been quite encouraging. And we always knew the slots would take time to ramp. If you think about it, when we opened our doors in our local database, we had zero customers. Fast forward 136 days, we have 250,000 people in our database, which is significant growth. In order to compete in a high frequency market where people are coming multiple times a month, a robust database is necessary because you need to message to the customers what it is you're doing each week and why they need to come into the property. We are on the path to growth there and I think that we have the right team in place. So that's really the wrap on the third quarter, but what I'm excited about is 2020. And the reason is we began a transition with this company in 2018. We reallocated capital to Macau. We thought about Las Vegas differently. We focused on opening Encore Boston Harbor. And if you look at where we are today, I was in Macau two weeks ago, walking when Macau, our new property downtown, with Ian and Ciarán who runs the property and Linda looking at what's about to open in 60 days. We've taken everything that we know about compression of energy in space and what works in food and beverage in new hotel rooms and we've invested in Wynn Macau to make what we think will be the best premium Mass product on the peninsula and it will continue to gain share. We have 7,000 square feet of new retail that we’ll be opening, two new restaurants, the new casino and a fully remodeled Encore Tower. All of that opens at the end of this year and in early 2020. And we’ll position Wynn Macau as a market share taker in the very near future. Wynn Palace remains as the high quality environment that is really going to continue to be the aspirational property at Cotai. So it's not just our product that I'm excited about, when I was there and we were talking not just internally, but to our peers in the market, people are quite sanguine about Macau in 2020. There's a new government that's coming in and people are very excited about in December. A lot of the infrastructure projects that have been talked about and underway for years and years and years in Hanshin Island are starting to complete. Visitation in Macau has been up double digits for the last three quarters. So 2020 feels like Macau is well positioned for growth and that we are well positioned to capture our share of that growth. If you look at Las Vegas, we actually have more products coming online in 2020 than we have since we opened Encore in 2008. We have a 430,000 square foot convention center that's opening in 90 days. This convention center is on our golf course and has a 390 foot promenade with two story glass walls overlooking the golf course leading to an 83,000 square foot ballroom. That's almost two acres. And when we walk event planners into that space, their jaws drop and they ask where do we sign. That will be opening in 90 days. On top of that, we have three new restaurants that we'll be opening in 2020 creating an entirely different segment of social dining at Wynn Las Vegas and we are very excited about where we are positioned and how we're positioned against our competitors for 2020. And if you think about Boston, we're at the beginning of the ramp. We're not at the end. So each quarter we're going to be tweaking our marketing, we're going to be focusing on growing our database, working on controlling expenses and growing revenues and EBITDA each quarter. So I'm very excited about the transition that we've been through and the future of this company as we move forward into 2020. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Craig.