In preparation for RCL's 3Q earnings release on Thursday, we’ve put together the recent pertinent forward looking company commentary.

RCL YOUTUBE - RCL66666

2Q CONFERENCE CALL YOUTUBE  

  • "From 2012 through 2016, our berth capacity growth is less than 3%, and in fact, we don't have any ship deliveries in 2013 at all. But...we also can't stagnate. Given the long lead time for a new vessel, we're approaching the point where a new order could not be delivered until the middle to late 2016, by which time we will be enjoying much better profitability and much improved credit metrics." 
  • "Over the past couple of months, bookings have been running slightly ahead of this time last year from both Europe and North America. We have seen a shift to a closer in booking window in key European source markets, particularly those in Southern Europe. The booking window for North America and most other non-European countries is largely the same as it was at this time last year."
  • "The fourth quarter is yet another story... as of the time of our last call, both load factors and APDs were running ahead of the same time last year. For the last few months bookings have been rather stable, and with only 28% of our inventory in the more volatile European itineraries we are hopeful to return to yield improvement in the fourth quarter."
  • "Royal Caribbean International will decrease in capacity by 4% in 2013. Our growth trajectory will not resume until we take delivery of the first Sunshine ship in late 2014....the company overall will have 10% less capacity in Europe in 2013."
  • [Q1 2013] "Our order book is solid at this point, our load factors are running ahead of a year ago."
  • "For Q4 – we're ahead on both load factor and APD today."
  • [Business booked] "For Q3, we're obviously behind where we would normally be at this time and for Q4, we're doing a little bit better than we would expect."
  • "We've seen more contraction in the booking window in Southern Europe than we have in Northern."
  • [Australia/New Zealand] "I don't regret having more capacity in a market that is getting very robust rates but those rates may be stable instead of going up."
  • "For 2013, I'll give you the percentage of our capacity that is in Europe by quarter. It's 1% in Q1; it's 31% in Q2; it's 49% in Q3; 24% in Q4; and the overall is 27%, which is down from 30% this year. I think we are seeing in Europe a gradual healing I think from the incident in Italy."
  • "Pullmantur...has gone from I think it was 87% Spanish customer-base to now closer to 40% Spanish customer-base as they shift demand to places like South America and Brazil."
  • "The percentage of our customers on our European cruises in 2012 that are coming from North America will be a few percentage points higher than what they were last year or what we had originally expected them to be. It's not a seismic shift but it is slightly higher. Which means that notwithstanding whatever the impediments have been, we have in fact been able to get some additional help from North America with the various challenges that we face in Europe....I don't think that there has been a notable change in that trend."
  • "What we see is that we are in fact able to drive the late business at good volumes. Clearly not at the rates we would like to be commanding for these products, but we are able to drive the business. So that is coming from actually all European source markets."
  • "We've been a little bit more bearish on the Euro so we've not had quite as much exposure there. We tend to have a little natural hedge on our P&L for that so I think we've been less aggressive hedging our new-builds, and as a consequence if we were to hedge those today we'd have a benefit from when we originally entered the contracts, specifically for Sunshine."
  • [Capex growth target] "We're now targeting more low to the top-end mid-single-digit growth within a given year."
  • [Caribbean performance vs that in 2008] "I'd say bigger than we were in 2008... The number of guests that we're attracting on these cruises is higher and the yields are also commensurate with the 2008 levels at this point."
  • "Volumes essentially will need to be higher on a year-over-year basis, the close-in volumes, because we have a larger capacity hole to fill in Europe because of the way that the market developed this year....and at this point, I can say that we are finding that."
  • "Industry overall is making some changes which will probably result in Europe having a slightly less share of the overall cruise industry in 2013 than it had in 2012... I'm talking about something like about 33% this year to maybe somewhere between 31% and 32% next year. So again, it's not a seismic change. But it does reflect the fact that the industry and our company's assets are mobile, and over a two to three year period especially when we do our deployment cycles, we're able to make changes that are reflective of the market opportunities and challenges that we see."