Las Vegas Sands Corp. (NYSE:LVS) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Rob Goldstein : We’re not going to discuss EBITDA at this point, except for what you’ve seen in Singapore. I do think energy is a vast thing. It does vastly. It doesn’t go one way, as you well know, whereas wages, I think, worldwide are going to be an issue for everybody. And I think we’ll deal with that. They’re not — I don’t see them coming down a whole lot. Again, our resorts and our capacity constrained ability to price up — the rating at our business is you can price up and retain your margins. That, I think, will be our strategy in Singapore and also in Macao. I don’t think wages are going to decline greatly. I think Grant alluded to efficiencies, and then that’s important. We have a large workforce, in the tens of thousands, in Macao. So more efficient and better doing what we do, that should be helpful. But I think we’re all going to live with at this point in the U.S. and Asia, higher wages appear to be in the structure for now. Patrick?

Patrick Dumont : I think the key thing is that by the nature of our business, we have resiliency in the face of inflation. As Rob mentioned, we have a lot of flexible pricing, hotel rooms, gaming pricing, the way we operate food and beverage, that we operate all of our non-gaming amenities. These are not long-term contracts. We have the ability to go with the market. So while there are some structural increases around wages, around inputs that we use, at the same time, we have the ability to price because of the unique nature of our products the experiences we offer to be fair to the positioning of the products that we have. We’ve invested a lot over many years in both markets, the reason why they’re so strong. So in our mind, inflation is a real thing. We have to take into account but we have the ability to work through it and actually grow the margins of our business over time.

Cassandra Lee : Great. Thank you. And shifting to New York, how do you share or disclose publicly what kind of investments you expect to make if you win the gaming license versus if you don’t?

Rob Goldstein : Yeah, the current thought in our heads is about $4 billion to $5 billion. Again, this is not a regional casino. This is a full-blown resort. With MICE, entertainment, retail, restaurants, it’s the real thing. It’s not meant to be a small time investment. We’re going all the way in and building something transformational that drives tourism. And we think will be the biggest, in terms of the casino business will be the biggest revenue generator.

Cassandra Lee : Great. Thank you so much for taking my questions.

Rob Goldstein : Thank you, appreciated.

Operator: Thank you. And the last question today will be coming from Dan Politzer from Wells Fargo. Dan, your line is live.

Dan Politzer : Hey, good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for I guess, first on Macao. I know VIP was historically about a quarter of your total business. I mean, to what extent, if any, have you seen this customer return and in what form has it been more of a credit, a direct VIP type customer? Or is this customer showing up in premium mass?

Patrick Dumont : So one thing to note is the VIP contribution was much lower than that. So let’s call it, high single digits, low double digits historically. We’ve always been mass and premium mass driven. So it’s — on a contribution basis because the margins in premium and VIP and, to be fair, junket business, were always structurally much different than they were for our mass business. So we’ve always been led on a contribution basis by our mass play and our premium mass play. And you can tell that by our asset base and how we speak to our customers and the type of tourism we attract. That being said, I do want to turn it over to Grant for some additional comments.

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