Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts
Thank you, Craig. At Wynn Las Vegas, we generated $246.3 million in adjusted property EBITDAR on $636.5 million of operating revenue during the quarter delivering an EBITDAR margin of 38.7%. Hold was a bit of a mixed bag given results in the Sportsbook, and we estimate a net $5 million benefit from higher than normal hold in the quarter. opex, excluding gaming tax per day, was $4.1 million in Q1 2024, up 9% year-over-year and in line with the increase in operating revenues as we successfully absorbed incremental opex related to Super Bowl programming, union-related payroll increases and other inflationary pressures. Turning to Boston. We generated adjusted property EBITDAR of $63 million on revenue of $217.8 million with an EBITDAR margin of 29%. We've stayed very disciplined on the cost side and, excluding a $2 million benefit from a onetime item, opex per day was $1.19 million in Q1 2024, up around 2% year-over-year. The team has done a great job mitigating union-related payroll increases with cost efficiencies in areas of the business that do not impact the guest experience. Our Macau operations delivered adjusted property EBITDAR of $339.6 million in the quarter on $998.6 million of operating revenue. As Craig alluded to, we estimate higher than normal hold positively impacted EBITDA by around $19 million during the quarter. VIP hold was largely in the normal range with the hold impact primarily related to higher than normal hold on Wynn Palace's mass table games. EBITDA margin was 34% in the quarter, an increase of 140 basis points relative to Q4 2023 and 310 basis points relative to Q1 2019. Overall, our strong margin expansion relative to 2019 has been driven by a combination of the favorable mix shift to higher-margin mass gaming and operating leverage on cost efficiencies.
Our opex, excluding gaming tax, was approximately $2.6 million per day in Q1, a decrease of 17% compared to $3.2 million in Q1 2019. opex increased 3% on a sequential basis, well below the 10% increase in operating revenue. The team has done a great job staying disciplined on costs, and we remain well positioned to drive strong operating leverage as the market continues to recover. In terms of capex in Macau, we're currently advancing through the design and planning stages on several of our concession commitments. And as we noted the past few quarters, these projects require a number of government approvals, creating a wide range of potential capex outcomes in the near term. As such, we continue to expect capex related to our concession commitments to range between $350 million and $500 million in total between 2024 and the end of 2025. Moving on to the balance sheet. Our liquidity position remains very strong with global cash and revolver availability of nearly $4.2 billion as of March 31. This was comprised of $2.2 billion of total cash and available liquidity in Macau and approximately $2 billion in the U.S. On the capital markets front, in February, we issued a $400 million add-on to the Wynn Resorts Finance 2031 unsecured notes with net proceeds along with cash on hand used to fund the tender and repurchase of $800 million of Wynn Las Vegas notes maturing in March 2025. Over the past four quarters, we've reduced company-wide gross debt by approximately $1 billion. Bringing it all together, the combination of strong performance in each of our markets globally, with our properties generating over $2.3 billion of trailing 12-month property EBITDAR, together with our robust cash position, creates a very healthy consolidated net leverage ratio of just over 4 times. Our strong free cash flow and liquidity profile allows us to reduce leverage while returning capital to shareholders.
To that end, the Board approved a cash dividend of $0.25 per share payable on May 31, 2024 to stockholders of record as of May 20, 2024. Additionally, in late March, the Wynn Macau Board recommended the reinstatement of a dividend at $0.075 per share or USD50 million highlighting our commitment to prudently returning capital to shareholders in both the U.S. and Macau. Finally, our capex in the quarter was $97.7 million primarily related to the Villa renovations and food and beverage enhancements at Wynn Las Vegas, concession-related capex in Macau and normal course maintenance across the business. Additionally, we contributed $70 million of equity to the Wynn Al Marjan Island JV project during the quarter, bringing the total equity contribution to date to approximately $160 million.
With that, we will now open up the call to Q&A.