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

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Carlo Santarelli: Understood, that’s helpful. And then just on the leverage point and tying that back to the buyback, you guys — I want to say, Josh, when you look at your leverage kind of EBITDA relative to your traditional net debt, correct? So, you target the 2.5% range. It would more or less imply, and obviously, numbers moving around and whatnot, but maybe not commensurate with last year’s buyback, but certainly, you would be able to do something similar to last year’s buyback. And that $100 million a quarter that you guys have previously talked about, does that kind of remain the goal on any dislocation get more aggressive? Is that kind of how you’re thinking about it? And then just as an aside to that, you guys, I thought, had development advances to the Tribe that were going to come in this year.

I did notice there was like $14 million to $15 million of an interest payment. And I wanted to understand if those two things were linked or if you still expect cash payments at some point this year.

Keith Smith: So, Carlo, this is Keith. You’re right on the share buybacks. We’ve been communicating for the majority of2022 that we’re targeting $100 million, and we remain targeting $100 million per quarter. If there are some dislocations, given the strength of our balance sheet, strength of our cash flows, then we have the opportunity to do more than that, but we want to continue to anchor people in right around $100 million a quarter. So, we’ll just kind of see how that plays out, but we don’t want to set an expectation that it will be higher than that. And then on top of that, the dividends that we talked about will continue. In terms of development advances, you’re right, we will start to see those being repaid this year. Probably later this year, we’ll start to see those repaid. The property has been off to a great start, and we’ll see that cash flow into the company second half of the year.

Josh Hirsberg: Yes, Carlo, what you were referencing is we had reserved all of our advances that we have made to the Tribe. And so once the casino opened, the risk associated was reduced. And so part of that recovery was shown in interest in — as interest income and the other half was shown down in, I think, the preopening line. So, that’s what got picked up on that was actually out of cash payment to us.

Carlo Santarelli: Great. Thank you guys.

Josh Hirsberg: You’re welcome.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Shaun Kelley: Hi, good afternoon everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Josh or Keith, just sort of one area for me was you called out the transition of some of the online gaming features, I think, moving over to your in-house platform. And I believe, Keith, you said it was in the next couple of months. Can you just talk a little bit about the economic implications there? Is that — does that transition allow you to consolidate a material amount of incremental EBITDA? Or kind of how is that going to play through as you start to take those operations back in-house?

Keith Smith: Yes. So, we’d expect that transition to occur sometime in the next couple of months, I think midyear in terms of probably when that happens. As you think about 2023 and maybe early 2024, you’d expect — I think what we’d ask you to expect is probably no change in the overall economics as we transition them. With any transition, there’ll be some breakage as we start to move people over to our platform, slight differences and we start to grow it. So, in the first year, probably flat economics, and then it will build from there. We do expect by consolidating it and more fully using our databases that we’ll be able to grow that to a higher level, but not in the near-term. Near-term should be flat.

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