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

Page 5 of 11

Shaun Kelley: Great. That’s my only question. Appreciate it everyone.

Keith Smith: Great. Thanks Shaun.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Steve Wieczynski with Stifel. Please proceed.

Steve Wieczynski: Yes guys. Good afternoon. So, I want to go back to the recovery that you’ve seen or that you saw in the South and the Midwest in January. And I’m not really sure how to ask this, but do you think that January recovery was real? And what I mean by that is, with December an anomaly and the January recovery was tied more to delayed or canceled trips being rebooked into January because of weather, or was January benefiting from whether it’s higher social security payments. I’m just trying to figure out — maybe you can give a little more color on that recovery in January.

Keith Smith: So, Steve, as you think about Q1 and January, in particular, look, in — early in the quarter, frankly, the comparisons are easier because last year, in January, we were coming out of Omicron here in Nevada. We still have some mask mandates. People weren’t fully coming out. And the second half of the quarter, both here in Nevada and across the MSR, the business accelerated. And so in fairness, January comps are a little easier than later in the quarter. I think what we were trying to communicate was set aside year-over-year comparisons and just look at raw customer trends and how the customer is performing, we didn’t see any meaningful differences in how the customer is performing as we look at the second half of Q4 and how they performed in early January. So, kind of ignoring year-over-year comps, just looking — think of it more sequentially is how we think about that.

Steve Wieczynski: Okay. Understood. And then, Josh, just given the Midwest and the South segment now includes the online and management fees in there, just wondering if you could help us think about maybe how margins should trend in that segment moving forward. And if I could also ask two housekeeping questions, I’m not sure if you’ll give it to us, Josh, but maybe help us with corporate expense and interest expense this year?

Josh Hirsberg: Sure. So, in terms of the margins for us, remember, we have this enormous amount of taxes that are essentially a pass-through from FanDuel that we pay on behalf of them because we have the license in the jurisdictions that we operate, and that shows up as revenue and then 100% as an expense as well. So, that dilutes our margins pretty significantly. So, just to put it in perspective, our margins online last year were about 14%. This year, just the online piece, which is the tax pass-through, six weeks of Pala, which is now Boyd Interactive, and then the revenue share, that’s all at about 18% to 20% margins. So, that’s kind of how it is today. And it will all depend on how much that tax pass-through continues to grow because it will dilute our — continue to impact those margins.

I think in terms of — so hopefully, that answers that question, but if there’s other elements you want to note, feel free to ask, and we’ll try to answer. I think in terms of interest expense, we would expect our debt balances — of course, this depends on your projections of EBITDA, but I think we would expect our debt balances largely to remain fairly consistent. So, any changes in interest expense are going to be purely based on your projections of interest rates into 2023. So if you think they’re going up, then our interest expense is probably going to elevate a little bit. But probably, in reality, not to be materially different than where it was in kind of the run rate of Q4. And then in terms of corporate expense, I mean, probably $1 million or $2 million higher than kind of what we saw in 2022 would be a good number to think about for 2023.

Page 5 of 11