Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE:CCL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

James Hardiman: Got it. Really helpful. And then you gave us a bunch of good math in terms of how you think about paying down debt both this year and through 2026, maybe walk us through where you see the cash balance going? I think you said, you expect total debt to finish the year this year at 33 billion, what’s the net debt number or what’s the cash balance that you would expect? And then similar question for 2026. I think you called out a $8 billion total debt reduction. What’s that look like on a net-debt basis?

David Bernstein: Yes. So James, the cash balance should start coming down over time. You’re trying to get into a level of precision that goes beyond our forecasting. Remember, it’s not just debt and cash. Remember, there’s customer deposits, other balance sheet items, but putting it all together, our liquidity at the end of the second quarter was $7.3 billion and we do expect to see that decline over time. Pre-pause we were targeting 2% to 2.5%, and as we rebuild our financial fortress, we will bring our level of liquidity down to that level. Keeping in mind that most of the time, a good portion of our liquidity will wind up to be the undrawn revolver. So, even if we have 4 billion of liquidity, it may only be 2 billion of cash or something like that.

So, we do see the cash balance coming down, but the level of precision by year, by quarter is very difficult to project. But your math in all the numbers are – is good, and we’re continuing and confident that we can work through and achieve those.

James Hardiman: One more point of clarification. So, in the Qs, there’s a mention of [1.7 billion] [ph] of reserve funds from customer deposits and other assets, what’s the status of that, the opportunity to, sort of bring that onto the cash balance?

Josh Weinstein: Yes. We are pretty confident that will be ratcheting down nicely and we should get the majority of that back in – off of that line item and into our cash, the majority by the end of next year and the rest of it in the following year. So, we’re making good progress.

James Hardiman: Got it. Perfect. Talk to you guys tomorrow. Thanks.

Josh Weinstein: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Fred Wightman with Wolfe Research. Please proceed.

Fred Wightman: Hey, guys. Good morning. Do the 2026 targets assume that you return to China? And if so, what are you, sort of baking in there?

Josh Weinstein: Very good morning, Fred. No, there is no assumption in these numbers that we return to China. As you know, Costa was our brand, that was our China platform and through our efforts at portfolio management we were able to take the tonnage and move them to Carnival Cruise Line, which has gone fantastic, as a matter of fact, Carnival fun Italian style met our expectations and frankly exceeded them with respect to how it was embraced by the Carnival Guests so far. And so, frankly speaking, our assets are in a good place and they’re yielding more than they would, had we stayed the course, I believe. So, we’re very excited about China opening up for international travel with cruise companies, and we think that’s a great thing for the industry, but the fact is, we’re going to be probably on the sidelines of that for a few years because our assets are right where we want them to be.

And we can always relook at that. Obviously, our assets are mobile and we’ll do that, but we feel real good.

Fred Wightman: Makes sense. And then the last quarter you guys talked about exiting the quarter some improving performance out of Europe. It sounds like based on everything that you’ve said today that that trend has continued and maybe even accelerated, but can you just frame, sort of where you see the European cruise recovery versus what you’ve seen in North America and how to think about that in the back half?