Matt Maddox
Analyst · Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open
Thanks, Craig, and hello everyone, I hope that you are all safe and healthy like we're working from home right now. Instead of just jumping right into our first quarter results, what I'd like to do is spend some time talking about how we've handled this pandemic and the way that we've been thinking about it. So, well before we close our facilities in North America because of our Macau experience, I reached out to one of the leading experts really in the world in terms of pandemic research and global health security. It's the director of global health security from Georgetown University and engaged that team months ago. And spent daily conversations with that team trying to understand the situation and what was going on and how best we could protect our customers and our employees and provide information to our medical communities and to our state and local government. We actually, because of that led the industry both in Massachusetts and in Nevada, in closing our casinos, we suggested to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission in mid-March that it was time for us to close based on the data and based on the science and the potential community spread that we were seeing. And we actually closed our resorts in Las Vegas in advance of the state declaration to close and we were the first that led that. And we did it because at that time it was the right thing to do. And we knew that we needed to be early to make that move. We also knew during that time they asking our 30,000 employees, team members, 15,000 of them in North America, and 15,000 in Macau that a pandemic is upon us that we're closing our resorts. We felt that we should invest in our culture right now, because it's taken years and years and years to build the best team and the industry. And so we chose and I chose to pay all of our people, since we've closed to the end of May. We are one of the outliers in our industry or in hospitality in general that have done that. But I believe that investing in culture right now and making sure that your team members feel safe during these times is a corporate responsibility. And I also believe it's a great investment. I'm not sure how long this will last. And I'm not sure how much longer we can continue this practice. It's currently in May 31st. But what I know is when we do reopen and whatever state that is in Las Vegas, and in Massachusetts, that I want our team members to have smiles on their faces. It'll be underneath the mask, but it'll still radiate through, because we're in the business of making people happy. And only if our customers -- and our customers will only be happy, if our employees felt like they were part of the family. So that's been my focus is to really make sure that we're doing this as a family and to think about the future, because you can quickly disrupt a culture that takes years and years to build. It also allowed us I think to act quite fast in the way that we're thinking about a reopening because of the resources we had. As an example, I believe we were one of the first companies in the nation, not just in our industry within the nation to produce a detailed reopening plan. We published it for the world to see on April 19th. It's a 23 page plan that goes department-by-department, area-by-area, space-by-space, in terms of how we're going to keep our employees safe and our customers safe. It's actually become known as the Wynn plan and I've had sports teams call and walk through it, airlines call and walk through it, retail, large landlords call and walk through it, developers, dozens of CEOs to look at the Wynn plan and to think about it, apply it to their own business. And we did that, because we want to help lead the conversation to a reopening of our economy, but in a phased approach and in a safe approach, and focused on the data. We've been working with our experts and state and local officials on benchmarks to track that should be public and transparent. We've crafted with our medical community here in Nevada, benchmarks based on disease growth, which is a case growth coupled with hospitalizations and deaths. And the disease growth needs to be at a certain level before you consider reopening. We have set benchmarks for ICU capacity with our medical community, as well as ventilator capacity that you need the ability to achieve a two times surge and COVID patients in your ICU without needing crisis care to begin a phased approach to opening, as well as test positivity rate, which really measures the amount of tests that are being conducted in an area. Those benchmarks have been widely distributed, they're going to be quite public. And it's really a great way that our medical community is looking at this to think about phase openings of the economy. In Nevada, our governor has launched the concept of the phased opening. The phase one should begin in the next week or so, sometime around mid-May. And then based on the benchmarks and the data, I believe we will continue to see in phase two openings of additional businesses and potentially opening of our business in late May. But again, that is assuming that we stay in line with the benchmarks and that the environment is safe for customers and for all of our employees. In Massachusetts, they have formed a task force at the state level, and I want to commend both Governor Sisolak and Governor Baker for early fast action and for their tireless work on this effort. Massachusetts has also, I believe, will be coming out with a phased approach to opening they have clearly had a much more difficult time than Nevada has given the high amount of cases and deaths there, but their medical community has handled it really as good as has been handled around the globe and should be commended. On the testing front, we think a lot about this. And in fact, we in Las Vegas have signed a partnership with the University Medical Center, the Research Hospital in Las Vegas, whereby any of our employees can get tested for COVID-19. In fact, we have on-site testing tomorrow set up in an 85,000 square foot ballroom, with 25 nurses from UMC, all appropriately spaced out. And we believe that we'll have over the next couple of days, thousands of employees that will have been tested. These are the types of things that we're doing now in early into the eventual lead up to opening our properties. In Macau, we've been -- we remained open in Macau after the closure in the first two weeks of February. However, as all of you on this phone know the Macau volumes have really not been there because there's a 14 day quarantine of going in and out of Macau from Hong Kong or Mainland China. One of the some encouraging things that we have seen in Macau is first there hasn't been a new COVID case in Macau in weeks. Second in Mainland China and Macau and Hong Kong teachers and students are back-to-school as of last week. There's continued to be progress in the Macau government has publically talked about it. In the health check system, which in China, as I'm sure a lot of you are aware on your mobile phone, you have a red, yellow or green system that gives access to various areas. And Macau has been working very closely with lockdown to make sure that those health checks are in line. All of those seem to be in our progress. So we would anticipate that as everyone else is that progress will continue in terms of reopening the borders in a cautious way, resuming tourism in a cautious way. And the amount of progress that's been made over there has been extraordinary. Just looking at the results, high level, before our closure in Las Vegas, RevPAR was up 8%. In Massachusetts, we were on our way to record EBITDA and Wynn per unit per day before closure was up on the swap floor about 13%. In Macau, as we laid out for all of you on the first quarter call, during the closure, we were roughly between $2.2 million and $2.6 million a day of burned. And what we saw from February 20th to roughly March 20th after we reopened was a gradual increase in gaming volumes and particularly led by VIP in premium segment to the point where our burn way in a matter of three weeks, from $2.5 million a day to $800,000 a day. And we were back to roughly 25% of our volumes in the fourth quarter. So we're continuing to be optimistic about what's going to happen in Macau as the cautious reopening of the border continues. We're focused on our three pillars that we talked about on these calls, which in Macau, and in North America. In Macau, in particular is investing in our people, which we're doing, investing in our communities, which includes the greater Bay Area, and really helping to position when to be beneficial in the greater Bay Area and working on investments throughout the region and investing in our assets. So during these times, we have continued extensive design development work, design work on our Crystal Pavilion project in Macau and we remain very excited about it. So that's really where we are right now. I believe we're going to continue to lead in our industry in Las Vegas and in Massachusetts. We're working very carefully and closely on a daily basis with state and local officials and the gaming regulatory bodies. And I believe that the data will be transparent as to opening dates based on benchmarks. And we'll be ready to begin in the new normal atmosphere. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Craig to talk about some of our financial results.