In preparation for RCL's F1Q 2013 earnings release tomorrow, we’ve put together the recent pertinent forward looking company commentary.
YOUTUBE FROM Q4 CONFERENCE CALL
- "Clearly, we view the performance of European itineraries as the largest swing factor in our projections."
- "Even though the economies in the U.S. and in places like Germany and France still aren't... great, it's really the weakness in Southern Europe that is keeping our yields from truly exciting growth."
- "It's particularly interesting to note how well both Australia and China have held up. Both are looking towards flat to higher yields despite really very large capacity increases and in the case of China, that's in spite of the impact from the territorial dispute with Japan."
- "While the wave the season is off to a promising start in most markets, we've seen a significant deterioration in demand from Spain. All indications suggest the continued challenging operating environment in Spain for an extended period of time. This has resulted in significant changes in our plans and expectations for the brand."
- "As of today, our total booked load factors and booked APDs are slightly better than at the same time last year and better than this point in time in 2011."
- "U.S. source business is up significantly versus the same period last year. Asian and Australia bookings have more than kept pace with the added capacity we have placed in both markets. With the exception of the UK and Spain, Europe has been pretty solid."
- "The UK has been disappointing from a volume standpoint, but pricing is above last year."
- "At the itinerary level, the Caribbean will account for 44% of our 2013 capacity, which is a 4% increase from last year. We are seeing solid booking trends for this product group, and based on what we know today, we expect a record year for yields in the Caribbean."
- "Asia-Pacific will account for 10% of our capacity this year, which is an increase of about 45%. Our booked load factors look strong for sailings in the first half of the year, although pricing is behind a year ago. Overall, we expect yields to be about flat for this region despite the large capacity increases."
- "Alaska represents about 4% of capacity, and early bookings are looking good with both load factors and pricing running higher than a year ago. The remaining 15% of our inventory is spread across many other products, including South America, Bermuda, Panama Canal and Transatlantic itineraries. In aggregate, load factors are higher than last year for these products, with pricing running slightly ahead."
- "Europe represents 27% of 2013 capacity, down 3.2 points versus 2012 against the backdrop of the Arab spring in 2011 and both industry and macroeconomic adversity in 2012, we expect the yield increase in 2013 relative to both years. Northern European capacity for the industry and the company are substantially up and our year-over-year yield expectations are lower in the North than they are for the Eastern and Western Med, where our capacity is down in each sector for the second consecutive year."
- "We are in the midst... of the marketing investments that we are making, but we also both on capital and on the P&L, we're doing a lot of investment in IT right now. We're working a lot with our websites, our core reservation system, our ability to do a much more intuitive presentation to our customers as well as be able to do a lot more revenue management at a more granular level. Those are benefits that have begun to start coming in, but they will also snowball over the next couple of years. So, we've included some benefits this year in our revenue, but I think it's going to be 2014, 2015 that we really hope to get the biggest games out of that."
- "Overall, some of the areas that were helpful to us where shore excursions and beverage. Also in general, being more present in the Asia-Pacific region is good in terms of the spending by those guests. The revitalization of a substantial part of our fleet across brands is creating new revenue, onboard revenue opportunities. We were able to take some advantage of them in 2012 and would expect to continue to do so in 2013....As it relates to onboard revenue, there's a tremendous effort taking place across all brands to create onboard revenue upside, and I would say we're cautiously optimistic at this point in the year."
- "Our capital expenditures this year are forecasted to be approximately $700 million. This includes the revitalization of six vessels, progress payments for new construction and investments in information technology."
- "Our maintenance CapEx is generally in the neighborhood of around $200 million to $250 million a year. That could be slightly higher in a couple of these years due to some of the IT investments, but we've included that- the vast majority is obviously the new ships and the revitalizations."
- "A lot of the improvement ... is ... coming out of the Celebrity brand, and the early indications are very good."
- "I think the U.S. is for the most part, in line with the year ago. We do have some pockets, some products where people are actually beginning to book a little bit further out, which is obviously helpful. Northern Europe for the most part is very consistent with what we were seeing last year. But we have seen contraction in Southern Europe... countries are actually booking about a month closer to sailing than they had been a year ago."
- "In aggregate, we're feeling is though we will have yield improvement in Europe this year."
