Light & Wonder, Inc. (NASDAQ:LNW) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Oliver Chow: Yeah. Thank you for that question. I mean, listen, we delivered incredible results in the quarter. To your point, you called out there, our Q3 free cash flow conversion rate was strong, very strong at 43% and that yielded $123 million in free cash flow. The team did a tremendous job in managing DSO in Gaming and iGaming businesses. In addition, we did have some timing benefits related to working capital more broadly. That said, this will continue to be a focus of ours going forward. Now that we’ve moved past our strategic transactions and we are executing here in Q4, we do expect the free cash flow conversion to trend over 30% here, and then we’ll scale that over time. There is no doubt that generating free cash flow absolutely remains one of our key priorities.

And listen, we’re just firm believers that free cash flow is one of the key drivers of shareholder value. So we’ll continue to benefit from our strong growth profile and then solid balance sheet, but also the flow through of any operational efficiency benefits that we see.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. I think you said that. Well, I won’t miss a chance to give the team another plug. But if you look at these results, it’s growth, it’s margin expansion and you see it flowing through to free cash flow. So I mean, they were some of the highlights of this quarter, both the margins and the cash flow.

Jeff Stantial: That’s great. Thanks for the color guys. And then if I could just squeeze in one more question, for you Matt. So LIVE DEALER launch, now that you’ve gotten that off the ground, had a little bit of time to wrap your head around it, any kind of insights, anything that caught you by surprise, whether on the technology, or kind of otherwise as that product continues to ramp. And then, can you just kind of walk us through how you see the ramp progressing, bringing more customers in, kind of getting higher and higher GGR share for your games? Just any sort of thoughts on the phasing of the ramp, would help as well? Thanks.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. You’re welcome. Yeah. I think it’s a very exciting segment. Yeah. We know it’s going to get to 30% of the iGaming TAM over time. So this is a multi-year opportunity for us. It’s a segment that we belong in. If you think about the Shuffle Master IP, the things that we can bring to this sector, our — yeah, our ability to execute in that space. So yeah, we’re just in the very, very early innings, so we’re excited about the future, but it’ll take time to ramp. I think the thing that probably surprised us most, was the timeline to get compliant in this first state. I think when regulators look at anyone doing anything for the first time, it takes a little longer than you anticipate to get full approval. But we have that now.

And so I think the fact that we’re live in the US that gives us confidence that we can move into other states over time. We want to do it in a very capital efficient way. So we’re not in a huge hurry to accelerate our plans. We want to get Michigan up and running at scale before we move into other markets. But yeah, like I said, it’s a multi-year plan, but we’re comfortable with where we’re at and the opportunity that’s in front of us.

Jeff Stantial: Great. That’s really helpful color. Thanks again, and nice quarter.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. Thanks.

Operator: Thank you for your question. The next question comes from the line of David Katz with Jefferies. You may proceed.

David Katz: Hi, afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi, everyone. I wanted to just go back over capital allocation, and the different alternatives. Obviously, the buybacks are important. On an ongoing basis, there’s been some tuck-in activity periodically. What can we expect and how do you think about the boundaries looking forward in terms of how you might allocate choices?

Matt Wilson: Yeah. I’ll let Oliver kind of walk through the waterfall of priorities for us. I know coming out of the G2E show, there was a lot of industry discussion about potential consolidation. I just — from the outset, I’ll say M&A is interesting for us, but probably falls lower on the priority list. We’ve just done a huge amount of work to divest some pretty large scale assets to focus the platform to reduce complexity. So we wouldn’t be in a huge hurry to do a big piece of M&A that would throw more complexity back into the platform. For us, it’s really about executing against the vision now. So if we saw some tuck-in opportunities that helped accelerate our vision, help propel us towards this cross-platform vision that we have, then we’d absolutely do it. But I think M&A falls lower in our priority waterfall.

Oliver Chow: Hi, David. So, yeah, I mean, listen, our capital management strategy, broadly speaking, really remains intact. The SciPlay transaction was a significant milestone for us as a business, and we continue to see the benefit of our strong balance sheet. It really does position us well to take on value creative opportunities as they arise. In terms of leverage, we are comfortably within our targeted range of 2.5 and 3.5 times, even after an approximate half turn increase from funding the SciPlay transaction. We continued to be active in the share purchase program through Q3, and you saw us take advantage of what we think is an important value creation opportunity, and we were purchased $112 million worth of shares in the quarter.