In preparation for Boyd Gaming's Q3 earnings release on Monday, we’ve put together the pertinent forward looking commentary from BYD’s Q2 earnings release/call and subsequent conferences.
2Q YouTube
- “The weakness we experienced following our last conference call in early May is a reflection of the fragile nature of today’s consumer, and the fragile nature of consumer confidence in general. Whether it’s the burgeoning federal deficit, volatility of the stock market, the European debt crisis, or stubbornly high unemployment, the consumer is reacting more quickly to the news than ever before. Their current reaction has been to pull back on their spending. The severity and length of this recession has clearly had a profound effect on consumer behavior.”
- “We anticipate that the third quarter will trail last year’s results, but as we have said in the past, starting in the fourth quarter, we will have much easier comparisons going forward.”
- “However, starting in late June and continuing into July, we have seen a return to expected summer levels of business with occupancy and business volumes more representative of a typical summer season.”
- “We continue to believe that YoY growth is achievable by the end of this year.”
- “Las Vegas convention attendance in March, April and May increased between 3 and 5% and we expect to see meaningful growth in bookings in 2011.”
- “Normal seasonality for the Las Vegas Locals market shows a low point in the third quarter and a peak in the first quarter, with the second and fourth quarters lying in between.”
- [Downtown Las Vegas] “During the second quarter, we increased our market share by over one full % point to 30.5%, up from 29.2% in the second quarter of 2009.”
- “Borgata ended the quarter with a debt balance of $627 million. We issued an 8-K last week regarding a potential refinancing of Borgata’s debt. If the transaction is approved by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, a distribution of approximately $100 million will be made to Boyd.”
- “We continue to expect total corporate expense for 2010 to be $40 million in line with our previous expectations.”
- [Consolidated tax rate] “We expect this rate to be approximately 30% for the remainder of the year.”
- “I think what we saw in July and what we’d expect to continue to see throughout the summer, will continue to be in the trends that we generally saw in the first and second quarter.”
- “Going forward, we wouldn’t expect to have increased utility costs kind of in the fourth quarter largely because we had such terrible weather in the fourth quarter last year. Obviously in the third quarter it should be higher just because of the extreme heat that we are dealing with right now…We didn’t see rates dramatically increase. Really it is a usage issue.”
- “In the last couple of years as we have worked our way through this recession I think we – and most companies in the business have pulled back on what we call maintenance capital. And I think our focus going forward is to make sure our properties are well maintained and are competitive. [Maintenance Capex] increasing in 2011.”
- “We still believe buying EBITDA is better than building EBITDA in the current environment.”
- “Well as some of the opportunities we’ve looked at including Stations haven’t come to fruition, we’ll use our free cash flow to pay down debt, reduce our overall debt load and improve our leverage ratio just going forward as we look to de-lever the company, absent of this style of acquisition.”
