Wynn Resorts Ltd Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

Welcome to the Wynn Resorts 4th Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session of today's conference. To ask a question, press star 1 on your touch-tone phone, record your name, and I will introduce you. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the line over to Julie Cameron Doe, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. On the call with me today are Craig Billings and Brian Gulbrandt in Las Vegas. Also on the line are Jenny Holliday, Linda Chen, and Frederick Lubesuto. Please note that we've published a presentation to provide more color on the company and recent performance ahead of this call. You can find the presentation on our Investor Relations website. I want to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements under safe harbor federal securities laws, and those statements may or may not come true. I will now turn the call over to Craig Billings.

Good afternoon, and as always, thank you for joining us. I'd like to start today's call by taking a step back and taking a broader multi-year view of our business and talk about how the company is positioned relative to some of the broader forces shaping the world and our technology. We are now a little more than a year out from a meaningful milestone, the opening of Buen al-Marjan Islands. This development is significant for many reasons, but over the long term, its importance as a step forward in our geographic diversification stands out, especially in the context of an increasingly multipolar world. Recent actions in geopolitics, currencies, and metals reinforce our view that multipolarity is not a transient trend. With it comes meaningful shifts in historical patterns of travel, trade, technology diffusion, and capital flows. Increasingly, those patterns are coalescing around a small number of global hubs, notably the U.S., China, and portion financial markets, and we see it in the travel patterns of our international customers. At the same time, we are approaching a period of significant change driven by technology and artificial intelligence. Anticipation of those changes is already fueling substantial business formation and wealth creation centered again in the U.S., China, and portions of the country. That expanding wealth creation will continue to drive demand for what Wynn Resorts has always delivered, exceptional product and service for the Wynn. This brings me to two related capabilities that position us well for the long term. Our relentless focus on our core customer segment and our proven ability to develop and operate world-class assets in diverse geographies, thereby allowing us to meet the affluent customer wherever they choose to be. Opening of Wynn al Marjan, we are introducing a significant asset into a new and dynamic market. More broadly, we're moving toward a portfolio where we from assets. So as we begin 2026, Wynn Resorts is on track to become one of the most globally diversified companies in our industry. Now, for our product in Las Vegas, remained healthy across the board with drop, handle, and ADR all up year on year. While RevPar was slightly below last year, the overall results reflect our ability to balance stronger ADRs, remain well positioned to do this given our strong competitive positioning, and are encouraging with casino volumes and revenue in Macau has persisted. It's been such an honor to

serve as CFO here at Wynn. We're known for our beautiful buildings and five-star service, but what sets this company apart from all the others are its people. Extremely rare to work bringing that A-game every day, but that's exactly how it is at Wynn. It's incredibly special. So before I get into the quarter, I'd like to thank each and every one of our employees in Vegas, Boston, Macau, Marjan, and London for all you do to make Wynn the best in the business. Turning to the numbers. At Wynn Las Vegas, we generated $240.8 million in adjusted property EBITDA on $688.1 million of operating revenue during the quarter, delivering an EBITDA margin of 35%. Hold positively impacted EBITDA in the quarter by just over $8 million. OPEX, excluding gaming tax per day, was $4.6 million in the quarter, up 4.1% compared to the prior year, largely due to incremental costs related to payroll, higher repair costs. And turning to Boston, we generated adjusted property EBITDA of $57 million on revenue of $210.2 million, with an EBITDA margin of 27.1%. As Craig mentioned, low holds negatively impacted the quarter's results, while casino volumes and REVPAR were strong. Slot revenues were strong, up over 2%, setting a new record for Boston. We maintained our discipline on the cost side with OPEX per day of $1.18 million, up less than 1% compared to Q4 2024, despite continued labor cost pressures in the market. The Boston team has continued to do a great job of mitigating union-related payroll increases with cost efficiencies in areas of the business that do not impact the guest experience. Our Macau operations delivered adjusted property EBITDA of $270.9 million in the quarter on $967.7 million of operating revenue, resulting in an EBITDA margin of 28%. Lower than normal VIP hold impacted EBITDA by just over $16 million in the quarter, and though we do not report EBITDA normalized for math hold, our math hold in Q4 was about 250 basis points lower than the prior year quarter, impacting our overall EBITDA margin. OPEX excluding gaming tax was approximately $2.85 million per day in Q4, with the increase from Q4 2024 driven primarily by a full quarter of Gourmet Pavilion-related costs, normal cost of living expenses, and variable costs driven by healthy business volumes. In terms of capex in Macau, back in Q2 we initiated two projects, as Craig mentioned, an expansion of the Chairman's Club gaming area at Wind Palace and a refresh of our wind tower rooms at Win Macau. The impact of those projects on CapEx continues into 2026. For the full year 2026, we expect to spend a total of $400 to $450 million with several concession-related projects awaiting government approval. Moving on to the balance sheet, our liquidity position remains very strong with global cash and revolver availability of $4.7 billion as of December 31. This was comprised of $2.9 billion of total cash and available liquidity in Macau and $1.8 billion in the U.S. The combination of strong performance in each of our markets globally, with our properties generating over $2.2 billion of adjusted property EBITDA, together with our robust cash position, creates a very healthy consolidated net leverage ratio of just over 4.4 times. Our strong free cash flow and liquidity profile also allows us to continue returning capital to shareholders. To that end, the Wynn Resorts Board has approved a quarterly cash dividend of $0.25 per share, payable on March 4, 2026, to stockholders of record as of February 23. Our recurring dividend highlights our focus on and continued commitment to prudently returning capital to shareholders. In terms of capex, we spent approximately $171.2 million in the quarter, primarily related to the Fairway Villa renovations, Zero Bond and Sartianos in Las Vegas, the new chairman's floor at Wynn Palace, the hotel tower refurbishment at Wynn Macau, and normal course maintenance across the business. In addition to that figure, we contributed $79.2 million of equity to the Wernal Marjan Island project during the quarter, bringing our total equity contribution to date to $914.2 million. We also continue to draw on the Marjan construction loan with a drawn amount to date of $769.6 million. We estimate our remaining share of the required equity, including the NUGENU project, is approximately $450 to $550 million. With that, we will now open up the call to Q&A.

Thank you. To ask a question, please press star 1 on your touchstone phone. Unmute your phone, record your name clearly after the prompt, and I will introduce you for your question. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. To withdraw your question, press star 2. Our first question comes from Dan Paltzer with J.P. Morgan. Your line is open, sir.

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. And, Julie, congratulations on the retirement, and thanks for all the help these past few years. First question on Vegas. Some of your peers have been fairly upbeat on the path for higher-end luxury properties to grow in 2026. And I recognize, Craig, you mentioned the limited booking window and visibility outside of grouping convention, as well as the Encore Tower disruption. But I guess as we think about those puts and takes and your level of confidence in this high-end customer, you know, the strength retaining or maintaining here, you know, how do you think about the path to growing in Vegas in 2026?

It's kind of funny because I feel like we've spent the past few years trying to convince people that we weren't going to decelerate, and, you know, we've continued to hold up very, very well. Well, if you look at the drivers in 26, I noted the headwind of the rooms that will be out of service. And certainly, again, we'll try to pick up the group business as to do gaming volumes. You can see gaming volumes in. That gives you a sense for how tables and slots are holding up. So we feel good about our ability to perform really, really well in 2026. I mean, by any – Got it.

That makes sense. And then just in terms of the OPEX, Julie, I think you touched on Macau taking a little bit higher. In Vegas, I think there's been a little bit of an increase there, too. Is there any kind of parameters to which to think about the OPEX growth in Vegas as well as Macau for 2026?

Yeah, I mean, I'll start with Vegas and move on to Macau. So, I mean, the team in Vegas remains incredibly disciplined on OPEX, and we did raise our outlook last quarter to $4.3 to $4.5 million outside of major event periods. We ended up slightly above that range at $4.6 million in Q4. It's a very heavy event period with Formula One, Concours, New Year's, and a busy convention calendar. You know, we also continue to see normal wage inflation in the union and non-union areas of the business. But otherwise, we're managing OPEX very tightly. And in terms of the outlook, we're not changing our expectation for OPEX to be in that $4.3 to $4.5 million per day range outside of major event periods. If I move on to Macau, you know, Macau, obviously, as we said on the call, we've got a full quarter in there of the Gourmet Pavilion, and we've had some, you know, obviously some cost of living increases going on in there as well. We once again saw the variable impact of higher business volumes in the quarter because we had very strong volumes in the quarter. We raised our OPEX per day expectations last quarter to be in the range of $2.7 to $2.9 million, and we're aligned with that number.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. Our next caller is Lizzie Dove with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks for taking my question, and I'll echo my congratulations and thanks to you, Julie. I really appreciate all the help and wish you the best going forward. Sticking with Vegas, first of all, I guess similarly kind of on that OPEX side of things, just thinking about the margins. You know, I think the margins in Vegas are obviously up a lot versus 2019, that you've just seen such incredible strength there. And, you know, there's been a bit of a give back over the last couple of years, maybe a bit of a return to normal, whatever you want to call it. But just thinking about really over the longer term, not just 26, but how you think about just margin expansion, whether that's possible at some point in Vegas, or if there's still a bit of a kind of normalization to go there?

Sure. We've always been pretty explicit about the fact that we don't really manage to margin per se, right? What we do is try to absolutely top-tick revenue, which is sharing gaming and driving ADRs. We're doing both of those things. So we don't really give margin guidance, and we don't look forward in terms of margin, but philosophically that's really how we approach it, and I think you saw that.

Got it. And then just on the Encore renovation, you know, it's helpful to call that out. And, you know, on my math at least, the 80,000 room nights could be maybe 50 million of EBITDA impact, you know, assuming that you don't get any recapturing on the rate, which you did mention. Anything that you could share there and just how you're thinking about it, particularly in the second half once you kind of fully start the renovations and also typical kind of IR arc on the longer-term basis of projects like this?

That sounds a little bit high to me, but the way to think about it is we stage and step. So that's one of the ways that we mix, thereby allowing us that we will – we expect that we will pick up. Beyond that –

Thank you. Thank you. Our next caller is Sean Kelly with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. First of all, Julie, thanks for all of your time and attention and, of course, the hospitality on the UAE trip. It was spectacular, so you'll be missed. And, you know, if I could, I wanted two questions on Macau. Maybe first, Craig, if we could lead off with a little bit of color on, you know, there's concerns both about promotions in the market and competition. And then, you know, specifically, we've got some questions around just mix shift between VIP and premium mass. I know you kind of specialize in sort of both these segments. So just kind of wanted your thought on the overall environment. And then, you know, again, are you seeing any sort of notable shifts between business lines on, you know, like that may be impacting or changing margins in that segment?

Sure. Thanks, Sean. Yeah, both of your questions kind of lead to margin. I guess, first of all, with respect to margins overall, margins in the quarter were really affected by three things. a significant jump in VIP volume. Unusually low hold-in-map. Crew reinvestment on theoretical, not actual. And then the incremental opex beyond, you know, in the business. As you know, VIP can be incredibly lumpy. It's just the nature of the business. I wouldn't be proclaiming or at least a win. With respect to reinvestment, and again, as we've discussed on prior calls, a short booking window. And we'll adjust reinvestment up.

Very clear. And then as my follow-up, you mentioned the prepared remarks as well, some of the excitement around the new chairman's club space. So just wondering, could you give us a little bit more color and detail there? I think timing sounded like open by Chinese New Year, but you talk about the kind of scope and scale there, what you've been investing, and potential impacts for both 1Q and maybe the full year.

Yeah, we are waiting on, I think, one final. So we do expect a significant Q1. We're hoping to get into Chinese New Year. Just confirming that we have the approvals of opening today.

Oh, thank you.

So we're good to go. You can strike the word expect from the group.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. Our next caller is Robin Farley with UBS. Your line is open. Sorry, one moment, please. Robin, we'll go to the next caller. John Ducree with CBRE. Your line is open.

Hi, Greg, Julie. I'll pile on to the congratulations and gratitude. It's been a pleasure working with you. Good luck. on what's next for you uh maybe to stick with las vegas uh kind of ask the kind of consumer question a couple different ways but um with lower occupancy obviously rate was up but you know i think it's impressive gaming volumes are up uh so higher food and beverage revenue and so craig i don't know if we could talk about you know are you getting more foot traffic in the door um from other properties not not staying at win or is it really just a higher price um Anything you could say about gaming volumes and F&B revenues being up, you know, despite a little bit of lower occupancy in the hotel?

Yeah, thank you. First, driving rate over occupancy is an incredible strategy. Rate over occupancy, we can change our restaurant opening hours. On the gaming volume point, it is definitely not the mass of gaming volumes. We set out three years ago now and changed a tremendous number of frosting strategies to our underlying technology, to aspects of our rewards program and our reinvestment, and that has resulted in a pretty significant shift. And this was another quarter where you saw the benefit of that. Brian, anything you would add?

I'd say the ops team, optimizing rev part, focused on keeping the restaurants full.

Very helpful. I think I piled two questions in there, so I'll step out of the queue.

Thank you. Our next caller is Brant Montour of Barclays. Your line is open, sir.

Good morning, or sorry, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Can you guys, I don't know, I don't think you guys have talked about this yet, but sort of the convention calendar for you guys for the year by quarter, Or, you know, any sort of what should we think about in terms of year-over-year comparisons and what stands out to you when you look out over the year in terms of group?

I think if you look at some of the city-wides, and it doesn't impact us as much, but there's some significant change this year over last year. Q1 is more challenged. And then we layer in pretty nicely. There's a couple holes in the summer. We have plenty of prospects.

And this is a follow-up on Macau. You know, you guys already talked about margins and sort of the effect of VIP mix. But when we look at just the VIP volumes, which look incredibly strong, and you're not the only ones that have seen this, can you just help us understand, you know, what's driving that? Is there more – are you guys doing more direct lending as part of that rolling chip business? You know, what are sort of the supply and demand, you know, things to keep in mind when we're trying to understand those trends?

Thank you. We definitely have not changed. As you know, in VIP, a number of players can.

Thank you. Our next caller is David Kass with Jeffries. Your line is open, sir.

Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. Julie, congrats and all the best. I wanted to just get an updated comment on Las Vegas broadly. And, you know, how do we think about the opportunity for your assets to continue to grow, you know, either top line or bottom line? Is it, you know, and I understand that the refurbs are necessary and helpful, you know, but how do we sort of think about your presence there, you know, growing longer term?

Yeah, look, the way I think about it is the rate of technology in AI and for our products will allow us to take it.

Next caller is Chad Bynum with McCrory. Your line is open, sir.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. And Julie, congrats on all your accomplishments as well. I wanted to ask, unfortunately, maybe more of a near-term question, just around 2026. I know a lot of the lodging companies and event centers are talking about the World Cup impact. I know it's making its way through Boston for a couple weeks, and then obviously in Los Angeles and other cities where international customers could be here and maybe frequent your properties, I guess my question is, do you think there could be an impact or maybe a spark that we haven't seen from maybe some international customers coming back into the market and then frequenting your properties? Thanks.

Sure. It's a good question. In Boston, for sure, direct impact there, I would expect. In Vegas, we have an entire, certainly we will.

Thanks, Craig. And then as it relates to AI, you talked about just the wealth effect that could improve your customer's wealth over the next couple of years and then drive business to your properties. But what about internally in terms of tech that you guys are using, either in-house or with certain vendors to help, whether it's, you know, search or content, kind of product on the floor? Do you think we will see an improvement in 26 versus 25 that could either help on the revenue or margin side?

Great question. Internal side, art and modeling. So, yeah.

Appreciate it.

Our next caller is Stephen Wozinski with Stiefel. Your line is open, sir.

Excuse me. And congrats, Julie. Hope you have a great retirement. Not sure if I missed this or not, Craig or Julie, but, you know, if we think about Macau margins in the fourth quarter on a more normalized basis, meaning, you know, hold normal in VIP mass, OPEX is quasi-normalized, you know, based on our quick math, is it safe to say those margins would have been pretty close to the 31.5% margin that was posted? in the fourth quarter of 24? Am I kind of thinking about that the right way?

You're a little above where we would put them. We would probably put them somewhere around 30.

Okay. Thanks, Craig. And then I'm not sure how much you'll say, Craig, or not, given that we're kind of in the first quarter, but Chinese New Year, obviously starting up in the next couple of days, would you give any kind of high level view on kind of where you guys are booked at this point or what do you think demand is going to look like? Yeah, booking

pace is good. We feel very good about where we are and with the opening of Chairman, something new and shiny that will delight our best customers so we're feeling good about Chinese New Year. We do and we've called this out. We do run into capacity but on the more basemask. We feel

great. Okay, gotcha. Thanks, Greg.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Our next caller is Trey Bowers with Wells Fargo. Your line is open. Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Great

to see you on the trip a couple months ago. I guess I'll be the first to ask an Al Marjan question, but as we progress through the year, could you guys just give us any kind of signposts to think about, be it even when the rooms will go on sale as we look towards just strength of the opening? And then a second part of that question would be, one question I get is just, it feels like the only hindrance in that market is supply constraint. And could you just give us a sense for when you look around the property, how long it's going to take for that area to kind of be fully built out and how necessary that is to hit some of the targets that you guys are looking for? Thanks so much.

Sure. The signposts along the way, we'll release them. With respect to when rooms will go on sale, that's the subject of discussion right now, but if I had to spitball it at this point, you are correct that it would be great to have a bunch of incremental room capacity. We are not dependent on that incremental room capacity to meet our base case. I want to be very, very clear about that. What we said when we were in the UAE, you know, meeting the or beyond with hotel capacity, Those of you that were there saw that construction happening. So the construction is absolutely happening. I don't expect a material uptick. I mean, we are.

Great, thanks. And I guess just a quick follow-up just to ask about my town. We saw in some of the trade rags that maybe a hotel expansion here in Boston was back on track. I didn't see anything in the slide deck and referenced anything planned for Boston, but could just you guys walk through any expectations around anything you want to do in this market?

So let me clarify, and we are contemplating providing a portion of that land to an MOU with the city of Everett, outlining certain things that we would each do.

Thanks, guys. Thank you. Our next caller is Ben Chaykin with Mizuho. Your line is open, sir.

Hey, thanks for taking my questions and just wanted to, you know, echo the previous comments. um maybe to follow up on ua you know recognizing you've provided us with a high level financial framework can you give us your latest thoughts on the mix of f and b entertainment versus gaming

and then some of the swing factors as you see it today i mean we we've outlined our uh beyond that the market is i think we've have many attributes that are consistent with las vegas which is non-gaming demand. You know, Vegas.

Thank you. Our next caller is Steve Cozella with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open, sir.

Hey, good evening, and thank you for taking our question. And I also wanted to say congrats to Julie. Maybe just following up on Almirjan, as we continue to get closer to the opening, can you share how your database continues to shape up and the efforts to build the pipeline to get the right people to the property when it opens?

We started building very senior. One-to-one relationship marketing has been well underway among high market, the unaided awareness.

Okay, great.

Operator, the next question will be the last.

Thank you. Robin Farley with UBS. Your line is open.

Great. Hopefully you guys can hear me. I wanted to circle back to your comment about Macau and reinvestment. I know you said there wasn't a significant jump, but I think that was in your reinvestments, Ben. Can you talk a little bit more broadly about what you're seeing in the environment? Others are talking about how much more competitive it's gotten. Are you seeing that stabilize in terms of what others are doing, even if your own reinvestment rate has not had a jump? Thanks.

Incremental reinvestment, I think you naturally get responses to that. I think you're really talking about a band market-wide, 200 basis.

And then just a quick follow-up on Vegas. Craig, in your comments when you were sort of talking longer term about demand and growth in 2030 and all of that, you kind of wrapped it up by saying you were making the point that you think about growth longer term, but you made a comment about, you know, 26 maybe not being greater than 2025, and I didn't know if that was just like a theoretical making the point that you weren't focused near-term, and I know you don't guide, but is the expectation, given the room remodel disruption, it would be reasonable to think that EBITDA would be down year over year? Is that sort of a takeaway that we should have from that comment?

I'm simply pointing out that, look, we don't, and so that manifests itself in two ways, gaming volumes. We've shown that we, and so opining on 26 for us is actually opining on the market. And I'm not going to opine on the market. In fact, we are thinking about, but my comment. Great, understood. Thanks.

Well, thank you for joining the Wynn Resorts Q4 Earnings Call, and thank you for all the kind words. We appreciate your interest in the company, and the team looks forward to talking to you again next quarter.

Thank you, everybody.