In preparation for WMS's FQ3 2012 earnings release Monday afternoon, we’ve put together the recent pertinent forward looking company commentary.
YOUTUBE FROM FQ2 CONFERENCE CALL
- “We expect to build additional product momentum that will generate further quarterly sequential growth in the second half of our fiscal 2012”
- “We signed a sales agreement with a major multi-site customer with 1,500 new units to be shipped through the calendar of 2012 to replace and upgrade a portion of their slot floors.”
- “We continue to gain traction in our growing network gaming business as we've successfully expanded our unique WAGE-NET networking gaming solutions to approximately 900 gaming machines at more than 50 casinos around the world…and our goal remains to have installations in 100 locations worldwide by the end of our current fiscal year.”
- “Player's Life Web Services recently surpassed 800,000 unique user log-ins.”
- “With additional jurisdictional approvals on a number of new Participation games, including THE WIZARD OF OZ Journey to Oz, BATTLESHIP, and the Pirate Battle, as noted in our last quarterly call, combined with initial approvals for our new Epic MONOPOLY game, which we received approval right at the end of December quarter, as well as the expected commercialization of additional new Participation products in the second half of fiscal 2012, we expect to install a number of these new themes consistent with our previous expectations, which should enable us to improve both our install base and our average daily rate in the second half of fiscal 2012.”
- “We remain focused on taking additional costs out of the Bluebird xD and the Bluebird2 cabinets through continuous improvement actions and we expect to realize margin improvements in the second half of fiscal 2012 through these ongoing initiatives. “
- “We expect to achieve expected cost savings in the second half of fiscal 2012 consistent with our previous expectations, which will result in improved operating leverage in the second half of fiscal 2012.”
- “We have approximately $161 million remaining on our repurchase program and just over 55 million shares outstanding.”
- “Overall, we anticipate that customers' capital budgets will continue to result in only limited improvements in industry replacement cycle in calendar 2012, but we will benefit from an increased demand from new casino openings and expansion.”
- “We expect to realize additional improvement in ship share in the second half of our fiscal 2012 as we continue to introduce new products with differentiated gaming experiences and new math models.”
- “We expect to generally receive a fair share in these new openings, likely averaging in the high-teens.”
- “We also expect additional incremental demand in fiscal 2013 from VLTs in Illinois, at racetracks in Illinois and Italy, coupled with the replacement cycle for VLTs in the Canadian provinces.”
- “ In Alberta, the lottery authorities expect to replace and upgrade their entire installed base of 7,000 VLTs. They've begun this process by announcing their intent to replace an initial 2,000 VLTs, and WMS was selected to replace 25% of these units. We currently expect to ship these units in the first half of our fiscal 2013, and in addition, we'll earn software revenues for future development and game sets. Other Canadian provinces, including Manitoba and Saskatchewan, are also in the process of evaluating VLT replacement initiatives, and we look forward to hearing their final decision within the coming months.”
- “In our Gaming Operations business, we expect to see improvement in our installed base and daily average revenue in the second half of fiscal 2012 through further jurisdictional approvals and the commercialization of additional new Participation products. I believe our product development pipeline for the second half of fiscal 2012 is among the broadest and most competitive that we've brought to market and includes unique and differentiated new games, such as CLUE, Life of Luxury Deluxe, Aladdin & The Magic Quest, GONE WITH THE WIND, Super Team and Monster Jackpots featuring the classic Universal Studio's monsters, along with several additional game themes for refreshing existing series and form factors.”
- “With the CLUE game, we will be partnering with Caesar's for the game's planned launch anticipated at the end of the March 2012 quarter.”
- “We've got about 1,900 games in our queue right now in our backlog, which is about a quarter and a half – we install about 85 to 100 a week.”
- Gaming operations: “We would like to end the year kind of flattish where we were – where we ended the last year. And that would be a good thing heading into 2013 with momentum and product, again coming out in the first part of 2013.”
- “We're likely to spend about the same that we did last year because we really started the process of changing out the Bluebird1s to Bluebird2s and Bluebird xDs in earnest in our fiscal 2011. So that number is going to be somewhere in the $65 million to $70 million range. Next year, that number should go down a bit, because we'll have changed out the brunt of it in fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2012.”
- “So continue to look for additional cost reductions” [in SGA]