Boyd Gaming Corporation (NYSE:BYD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Joe Greff: Hey guys. Congratulations on great results here. Keith, I’d love to just follow up with you a little bit, maybe dig deeper onto what you attribute the difference in consumer spend or consumer behavior between Downtown Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Locals market versus the softness you saw in parts of the 4Q in the Midwest and South. I know you called out the destination business is certainly strengthening in the Locals market. Maybe that was slow to come back. And maybe the regional customer has recovered earlier. Where are you seeing the softness? Is it sort of at the lower end of the database, the higher end of the database? I would just love to get how you’re looking at your different subsector of gaming consumer.

Keith Smith: Sure. So look, I think we’ve talked about some of this through our prepared comments, but look, the Locals business, once again, we’ve performed exceptionally well with our out-of-time guests during the quarter as convention attendance and visitation in Las Vegas continued to grow. That also helped boost the Downtown results. And so both of those are doing well. We obviously have a strong Locals component in our Locals segment. We don’t get very many locals to Downtown Las Vegas. And so it’s a different type of a customer. You commented, and we’ve long believed, that in these types of situations where you go through dislocations like we’ve been through with COVID, that the Midwest and South markets do recover a little quicker.

We believe those markets have been recovered longer than the Las Vegas market. And therefore, they’re a Littlemore mature. And so they’re just maybe slowing down a bit before others. And outside of what the December weather that really impacted both the Midwest and the South, some difficult comps that we talked about in our southern properties. When you look at 2022 compared to 2021, there was just some softness. But as I said, the softness was early in the quarter. And in the second half of the quarter, it started to recover and continue to recover through the end of the quarter and into January. So, I don’t think there’s any real negative trend there. It was softness early in the quarter. The ones get started to come back. So, not much more I think I can say.

Joe Greff: Great. And when you think about this year and maybe looking at your internal forecasts or budgets, would you expect that the Las Vegas Locals market would grow in excess of the core Midwest and South net regional, net revenue portfolio?

Josh Hirsberg: Hey Joe, this is Josh. I guess I get to take that one. I think we feel like coming into 2023, I think we step back and look at where the consensus estimates are and they’re coming down about 7% or 8% from where we delivered results in 2022. And I think we feel like our business can do generally in line with that or a little better. I think that we see some opportunities for growth in really both of those segments, but that I’m not so sure we’re ready to say that we’re going to see growth over 2023 in Las Vegas Locals. It will be — if it’s down, it’s down marginally relative to 2022. But it only goes to kind of the uncertainty of how the consumer — what happens with the consumer as we move through the year.

Joe Greff: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Carlo Santarelli with Deutsche Bank. You may proceed.

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