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

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Carlo Santarelli: Thank you for taking my question. I just wanted to circle back to 1 of the comments, Keith, I believe you made earlier. Sky River fees were $21million, with a $5 million one-time true-up payment or something in there for the management fee, and online was $17 million. If you kind of back that out and then back out half of that $17 million in the 4Q 2020, does it more or less imply or I believe that math more or less implies like a down double-digit EBITDA results for the segment in the fourth quarter? If that’s right, how much would you say, not necessarily the weather, but maybe that broader malaise that you saw early in the quarter relative to kind of where you were run rating for January of that decline, what would you — how would you kind of parse those out?

Josh Hirsberg: Yes. So Carlo, I’ll try to take a shot at it, and it’s a little bit more art than science, as you can probably imagine. I think that what we tried to communicate was we felt like there were some things that we could identify around the weather, around the more kind of robust business that we had seen in Mississippi and Louisiana last year that made the comparison a little more difficult this year. And then there was something kind of leftover that really was more relevant or more visible in the first half of the fourth quarter. And that’s where we really try to dig into our customers and see what was going on. And it was really abroad-based weakness in our customer. That was largely prevalent in the first half of the quarter.

It was something we really hadn’t seen to any extent before. And then as we move — and so — and I would say a lot of the weakness was concentrated in those two markets of Mississippi and Louisiana for us. And then as we move through the quarter, we know we were able to track and see those — that trend got better over time, sequentially improved. And then obviously, the last week of the year was very strong across the board. And as we mentioned before, we also saw kind of contributions from out-of-town business helping drive Las Vegas. So, as we kind of came into January, the trends from the late December continued. Business was really good. We recognize there’s a fairly — there was an easy comparison. So, it’s a little bit like you’re trying to dissect through how good should it be versus the comparison and how good is the business.

What we can tell you is it doesn’t feel like the customers — the customer certainly hasn’t fallen off the deep end. And the general trends of our core customer kind of regained momentum outside of Las Vegas and continue to build through the quarter, and that was encouraging to us. And Las Vegas remained very good for us, although early on, it also had some weakness in our customer base as well, primarily in October. So, it was just a quarter of a lot of different things going on. It ended up heading in the right direction for us. And I would say as we look back over quarters, earlier in the year, there’d be a soft quarter, an okay quarter and then a really strong quarter, and that’s — sorry, soft month, a good month and then a really strong month, and that’s what happened in the fourth quarter as well.

So, I’m not sure we’re at a place where we can extrapolate a lot from the customer trends that we saw in the fourth quarter, but that’s what happened from our perspective.

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