Wynn Resorts, Limited (WYNN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Wynn Resorts Limited Virtual Shareholder Meeting. [Operator Instructions] I would like to now turn the call over to Chair, Philip G. Satre. You may begin.

Thank you. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome all of you to the live broadcast of our 2021 virtual annual meeting of shareholders of Wynn Resorts Limited. I am Philip G. Satre, non-Executive Chair of the Board of Directors of Wynn Resorts Limited, and will be presiding at this meeting. Ellen Whittemore, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Wynn Resorts Limited will be Secretary and will conduct the business at this annual meeting. And I hereby call this meeting to order. Present at the meeting today are members of your Board of Directors, our CEO, Matt Maddox; and our other U.S. Executive Officers; Craig Billings, President and CFO; and Ellen Whittemore. Before I go any further, I want to remind you that we may make forward-looking statements under safe harbor federal securities laws, and those statements may or may not come true. I will now turn to Ellen Whittemore to review the matters under consideration at this meeting.

Thank you, Phil. Each of you should have registered in order to attend today's meeting. The agenda as well as our rules of conduct for this annual meeting are displayed on your virtual meeting screen. To conduct an orderly meeting, we ask that participants abide by these rules. Thank you for your cooperation. Prior to the commencement of this meeting, we received proxies representing approximately 83% of the number of shares of common stock of the company entitled to vote at this meeting. Accordingly, we have a quorum, and I declare this meeting to be duly convened for the purposes of transacting such business as may properly come before it. Christine Amrhein from American Election Services has been appointed to act as inspector of elections. The affidavit of mailing establishes that notice of this annual meeting was duly given. A copy of the notice of meeting and the affidavit of mailing will be incorporated into the minutes of this meeting. All shareholders of record at the close of business on March 12, 2021, are entitled to vote at this annual meeting. We will now act on the matters described in the notice of annual meeting that was sent with our proxy statement to all shareholders. The Board's position on each of the matters to be voted on at this meeting is set forth in the company's proxy statement. Most shareholders have voted on the proxy cards in advance of the meeting, but we will now open the polls to receive those votes and allow anyone wishing to vote at this meeting the opportunity to do so. The polls are now open and will close after all proposals have been presented. If you mailed in a proxy or if you voted over the telephone or online, you don't need to vote again at this time. However, if you have not voted your shares or if you want to change your vote, you may do so by clicking on the Voting button at the bottom right of your screen. The first proposal before shareholders is to elect 4 Class 1 directors. Your Board of Directors has nominated and recommends the election of Betsy S. Atkins, Matthew O. Maddox, Philip G. Satre and Darnell O. Strom for reelection as Class I directors of our company. The second proposal before shareholders is to ratify, and your Board of Directors recommends the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accountants for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2021. The third proposal before shareholders is to approve and your Board of Directors recommends the approval of, on a nonbinding advisory basis, the compensation of the company's named executive officers as disclosed in our proxy statement. In summary, your Board recommends that shareholders vote for each of the Board's nominees and for each of the company's proposals. Under the procedure set forth in our bylaws, no other matters may be properly presented at this meeting. So that completes the items to be voted on. We are going to close the polls. If you would like to vote your shares at this time, please use the Voting button at the bottom of your screen. [Voting]

The polls are now closed. We will file a Form 8-K with the SEC announcing the voting results after we receive a report from the inspector of elections. This concludes the formal business portion of our meeting, which is now adjourned. We will now hear from our Chief Executive Officer, Matt Maddox.

Thank you, Ellen, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. To say that 2020 was a challenging year would clearly be an understatement. But -- well, our Board of Directors decided in early 2020, along with our management team, was that no matter what, we were going to make sure that we kept our brand and our culture intact. Because we knew the pandemic was going to be a challenge, and we knew that we're going to go through some hard times, but we also knew that at some point, life would come back, business would reopen, and when would be the experience that people are wanting. We didn't know if it'd be 30 days or 60 days or 1.5 years. But what we knew was your brand can never be recovered if it's diminished and neither can your culture. So those were the things that we invested. We kept our people on board. We were the first to announce a new and put out a new health and sanitization plan to reopen the industry. We were the first mass vaccine distribution site, invest, public or private. And all along as we were continuing to make progress on COVID and make progress with our employees, we also kept investing in our business. We built new restaurants in Las Vegas that we haven't opened, that are going to be opening very soon. We built -- we're building a new sports bar that we started about -- and sports bar that we started about 7 months ago in Boston. That's going to be opening in the next couple of months. We built new restaurants and new gaming areas in Macau because we knew that while it was shut down and construction could continue, this is the perfect opportunity for us to rethink our business, and we have. And what we now know is that the unit economics in our business have never been better. Our company is in a position where our business will be much more efficient, and we can already feel the revenues are coming back. In Las Vegas, as many of our competitors have announced and we will be talking about shortly on our call, we're seeing call volumes back to 2019 levels. And really, what's more important is we're seeing [Technical Difficulty]. We're also seeing that in Boston, and we're seeing it in Macau. That's the one thing that we've all missed. And the excitement and acceleration that we experience when we see our customers back together again, having fun and feeling safe, there's a reason that the roaring twenties occurred after the Spanish flu back in almost 100 years ago. And we're going to experience, I believe, that exact same thing here. So our company is set up for the future. We weathered the storm. Our Board made the tough decisions to protect our brand, to protect our culture, and we are very excited about where we are today. And about the next couple of years to come. And I want to thank each and every one of you for sticking with us during this time, and we look forward to getting into more details on our earnings conference call in the next few days. With that, I'll turn it back over to Ellen. Thank you.

Thank you, Matt. We are now adjourned and will close the meeting. Thank you for being a shareholder and attending our virtual annual meeting. As Matt says, we look forward to seeing you at one of our resorts in the near future. Thank you.