Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. (NYSE:MSGE) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Dave Byrnes: Sure, Peter. First, on sponsorship, we’re in a good place in terms of our core marquee and signature partners. Coming out of the pandemic, we renewed a number of key partners, Verizon, Spectrum, Anheuser-Busch, Lexus. We have one signature partner up for renewal this fiscal year and can’t get into the specifics of it, but that deal is essentially done. So you’ve heard us say our market and signature partners represent the majority of our sponsorship revenue. With that, we have significant visibility into this business for the remainder of this fiscal year. In terms of new sales, we still have some work to do, and we’ll keep you posted as we make progress. And you mentioned we’re also – we recently announced our new sponsorship arrangement with Oak View Group, and we’re working through that transition now.

Overall, we continue to have some work to do this fiscal year, but we remain bullish about the sponsorship part of our business over time. And then as far as Oak View Group, while we’ve had success in growing our sponsorship business, last year’s results exceeded pre-pandemic levels and thinking about how to best position our sponsorship business for ongoing growth, we began discussing this new arrangement in place with Oak View. It’s under a new entity known as Crown Properties Collection. Oak View Group plans to represent most of the important assets and brands in sports and live entertainment. And Crown Properties will lead global partnership and sponsorship sales for us, including our venues and our live entertainment properties. We will continue to provide expertise and advisory services to Crown as well as retain partnership activation and fulfillment.

So again, we believe there will be a top line economic benefit over time from working with a leader such as OVG and I’d also add that part of this arrangement, our sponsorship business will now transition to more of a variable commission-based cost structure, which we find attractive.

Operator: And we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. Mr. Ari Danes, I turn the call back over to you for some final closing remarks.

Ari Danes: Thank you all for joining us. We look forward to speaking with you on our next earnings call. Have a great day.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.