Wynn Resorts Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

AlphaStreet
Provided by AlphaStreet
November 4, 2024
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Operator

Welcome to the Wynn Resorts Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call.

All participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session of today's conference. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

I will now turn the line over to Julie Cameron-Doe, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Thank you, operator. And good afternoon everyone. On the call with me today are Craig Billings and Brian Gullbrants in Las Vegas. Also on the line are Linda Chen, Frederic Luvisutto and Jenny Holaday.

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 the call over to Craig Billings.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Thanks Julie, and good afternoon everyone. As always, thank you for joining us today. It's about a month ago that we had the opportunity to host many of the folks on this call here at Wynn, Las Vegas to take you through our business in general and Wynn Al Marjan Island in particular. It was great to see you all and I hope that our confidence in our current business and in our development pipeline came through.

Our leadership position in the world's most attractive gaming markets, our targeted investments in our existing properties and our development in the UAE all give us great conviction about the future of Wynn Resorts. To that end, we announced that the Board has increased our share repurchase authorization to $1 billion, highlighting our continued commitment to prudently return capital to shareholders.

Turning to the quarter, and starting in Las Vegas. Demand remained healthy here and on a normalized basis revenue was up about 1% and EBITDAR was essentially flat year-over-year on very tough comps. Despite those very tough year over year comps, we grew hotel revenue by 5%, slot handle by 4% and continued to see healthy table drop in the Casino. More recently, demand has remained healthy in the fourth quarter with strong growth in slot handle, stable drop and solid non-gaming demand.

Now Las Vegas year-over-year comps are increasingly challenging, and I have said many times on these calls, trees don't grow to the sky. But demand from the high end consumer remains stable. And with $950 million of trailing 12 month EBITDAR on around $5 billion of capital in the ground between Wynn and Encore, we're extremely pleased with the performance of our business here. Looking ahead, our luxury positioning and unique programming continue to appeal to the market's most affluent and therefore most resilient customers, positioning us well to continue our leadership on the Strip as we move into 2025.

Turning to Boston, Encore generated $63 million of EBITDAR, up 4% year-on-year during the quarter. Demand was strong across the business with slot handle up 3%, table drop up 1% and non-gaming revenue up 2%. More recently, demand has remained healthy through October, led by strong year-on-year growth in slot handle and stable non-gaming revenue against another tough comp.

Turning to Macau, we generated $263 million of EBITDAR during the third quarter, up 3% year-on-year. Demand remained healthy with operating revenue growing 6%, led by 10% year-on-year growth in combined Mass Table and slot wins. While the competitive environment in Macau is clearly intense, we continue to focus on maximizing EBITDAR rather than purely market share. To that end, we have several initiatives in place that focus on our natural product and service leadership that we expect will support and drive market share in 2025 and beyond.

First, we continue to elevate our food and beverage programming with innovative new concepts including four recently renovated and reimagined venues at Wynn Palace, the recently opened Drunken Fish at Wynn Macau, and the mid-2025 opening of our destination food hall at Wynn Palace. The Casino, we are currently revitalizing and expanding the Chairman's Club, our most exclusive gaming area at Wynn Macau. And in the design phase for a similar expansion and renovation of the Chairman's Club at Wynn Palace. We are supporting these capex efforts with continued improvements to our recently enhanced loyalty program and our Only at Wynn events and experiences across culinary, music, entertainment and sports.

Longer term, our concession related capex including an event center and a production show will support visitation and ultimately drive share gains in a market where unique experiences are increasingly appealing to guests. We've seen the current competitive dynamic in Macau before and we are confident that continued investment in our market leading assets and 5-star service position us well to effectively compete profitably over time. More recently, October was characterized by healthy mass table drop, strong direct VIP turnover and 99% hotel occupancy.

We saw particular strength during the Golden Week Holiday period where mass table drop increased almost 30% compared to last year's Golden Week. Our long term outlook in Macau remains decidedly bullish. On the development front in Macau, we continue to advance design work on our event center and production shows for Wynn Palace. In fact, I was in Shanghai two weeks ago reviewing initial rehearsals for our production show and I was very pleased with the early work on the production.

Turning to Wynn Al Marjan Island in the UAE, we were honored to receive the first land based gaming license issued by the GCGRA back in early October and as I mentioned, we were delighted to share more details about the development at our Analyst and Investor update meeting here in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. Construction is rapidly progressing on the project with work now reaching the 24th floor of the hotel tower and over 3.6 million square feet of concrete and steel now in place. As we discussed at our update several weeks ago, we believe the UAE will be a $3 billion to $5 billion gaming market, and certainly the most exciting new market for our industry in decades.

I remain incredibly bullish about the future of our company. We have the best assets in the world's premier gaming markets and our team is the most dedicated team in the business. We are investing for long term growth with an exciting high ROI development in the UAE well underway, which is unique in our industry. Outside of UAE, we are exploring potential greenfield opportunities in attractive gateway cities and we have strategic land banks in each of our markets that provide additional development opportunities over time.

Meanwhile, our leverage profile continues to improve as free cash flow grows, allowing us to increase the return of capital to shareholders through the recurring dividend and opportunistic share repurchases. Our best days lie ahead.

With that, I will now turn it over to Julie to run through some additional details on the quarter. Julie?

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Thank you, Craig.

At Wynn Las Vegas, we generated $202.7 million and adjusted property EBITDAR on $607.2 million of operating revenue during the quarter, delivering an EBITDAR margin of 33.4%. As Craig noted, on a normalized basis EBITDAR was essentially flat year-on-year with lower than normal table gains hold negatively impacting EBITDAR by around $2 million in Q3 '24 and higher than normal hold, positively impacting EBITDAR to the tune of $12 million in the prior year quarter. Opex excluding gaming tax per day was $4.2 million in Q3 '24, up 2% compared to $4.1 million in the prior year period. The Las Vegas team continues to exercise strong cost management without impacting the guest experience.

Turning to Boston, we generated adjusted property EBITDAR of $63 million, up 4% year-on-year on revenue of $214.1 million with an EBITDAR margin of 29.4%. We've stayed very disciplined on the cost side with opex per day of $1.14 million, up less than 1% year-on-year and down slightly sequentially. The Boston team has also 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 $262.9 million in the quarter on $871.7 million of operating revenue with table games hold in the normal range during the quarter. EBITDAR margin was 30.2% in the quarter, an increase of 210 basis points relative to Q3 2019. Opex excluding gaming tax was approximately $2.55 million per day in Q3, up 7% year-on-year, primarily reflecting higher payroll and higher variable costs on increased business volume but flat on a sequential basis. 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 grow over time.

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 in 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 now expect capex related to our concession commitments to range between $350 million to $425 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 $3.5 billion as of September 30th. This was comprised of $1.7 billion of total cash and available liquidity in Macau and $1.8 billion in the US. The past few months have been active from a balance sheet perspective as we continue to extend our debt maturity profile and improve our leverage position. In fact, pro forma for a few transactions completed in early October, we've reduced gross debt by $1.2 billion year-on-year, resulting in approximately $70 million of annualized interest expense savings.

The combination of strong performance in each of our markets globally with our properties generating nearly $2.4 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 Wynn Resorts Board approved a cash dividend of $0.25 per share payable on November 27, 2024 to stockholders of record as of November 15, 2024. We also opportunistically repurchased just under 1.5 million shares for $118 million during the quarter. And as Craig noted, the Board recently approved an increase of our share repurchase authorization to $1 billion, highlighting our continued commitment to prudently returning capital to shareholders.

Finally, our capex in the quarter was $101 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 $18.2 million of equity to the Wynn Al Marjan Island project during the quarter, bringing our total equity contribution to date to $532.6 million. We estimate our remaining 40% pro rata share of the required equity is approximately $800 million to $875 million, fully loaded for capitalized interest fees and certain improvements on the island.

Importantly, we've also made meaningful progress on the debt financing for the project with significant interest from a diverse group of banks, both locally in the region as well as internationally. We expect the financing will be completed later this year, and we will update you in due course.

With that, we will now open up the call to Q&A.

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Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Carlo Santarelli from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Carlo Santarelli
Analyst at Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft

Hey Craig, Julie, everyone. Craig, maybe if you could start just kind of outlining as you look out to 2025 across the regions, some of the required revenue perhaps to maintain margins, what are some of the cost increases that you guys are kind of forecasting for [Technical Issues] within your control at this point?

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure, Carlo, you dropped up for a second there, but I got the gist of your question. So I guess first with the overriding statement that as we've said many, many, many times before, we don't manage to a margin. We aggressively manage revenues and we aggressively manage costs, always taking the brands into account. I think if you look across -- if you look across the two primary markets or today's markets, Vegas and Macau. In Vegas, the high end consumer, our consumer continues to hold up. We are facing incredibly tough comps which we've been pointing out quarter after quarter on these calls.

We've lapped the largest of the union payroll increases. And so while there is a little bit of wage pressure, it's nothing significant. So I guess 2025 in Vegas is really all about demand and everything that we see now indicates that we're in pretty good stead. I mean, geez, our retail lease revenue, which is heavily tied to luxury retail, was up 3.5% year-over-year in Q3. So we continue to see a strong consumer here, which gives us comfort in revenues, but not comps, because again, the comps are getting tougher and tougher and that is what it is. But we feel good about it here.

In Macau, Q3 was a little bit unique from a margin, since you were focused on margin. From a margin perspective, our market share was stable sequentially, but GGR was down because the market GGR was down quarter-over-quarter. I'm talking about now. Second, we had higher VIP commissions in the quarter because VIP turnover was up even though VIP GGR was flat. Third, retail revenue declined by about $3 million. And then we had an extra day in the quarter, so we had an extra day of opex. So it was a little bit unique in Macau, but in Macau, and we kept opex in line, by the way, on a per day basis. So in Macau, again, I think it really comes down to the competitive nature of the market there and market share versus EBITDAR as we set up into 2025. But again, it looks pretty good. We feel good.

Carlo Santarelli
Analyst at Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft

Great, thank you. And then if I could just one follow up as you guys, obviously, Craig, you've talked a lot for several quarters about some of the comp challenges in Las Vegas. To the extent that you could kind of frame the headwind that you guys will kind of be looking at, as well as the rest of the market in the first quarter from the Super Bowl last year. If you'd be able to put any parameters around that.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

No, we haven't talked about the incremental EBITDAR that we experienced with Super Bowl last year, and certainly that will be a headwind from a comp perspective, but we haven't put out any numbers. Q4 and F1 is actually shaping up quite nicely for us. You can look at our room rates, our posted published room rates relative to our competitors, and you can see that we're pricing at a very significant premium to the rest of the Strip. And as we, I think we said on the last call, although it's a later booking window than last year's F1, we thought we would be in pretty good stead, and that's certainly how it's shaped up.

Carlo Santarelli
Analyst at Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft

Great. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Next we'll go to the line of Joe Greff from JPMorgan, please go ahead.

Joe Greff
Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Good afternoon, everybody. Craig, just starting on Macau, you mentioned or you touched upon the competitive environment Macau and what you're doing to address it with different changes to F&B and venue and loyalty programs and various programming. Does it feel, if we look at where the market is today relative to the beginning of the summer that at least competitive pressures vis-a-vis reinvestment market wide in the business is a little bit better than where it was today versus at the beginning of the summer.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Yeah, stable to slightly better is I guess how I would characterize it. But it's still it's very competitive.

Joe Greff
Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Understood. And then just as a follow up to that, October obviously was great at the beginning of the month with Golden Week and the subsequent week after -- the rest of since then, does it feel like a normal period or does it feel like we're starting to see a little bit improvement in terms of visitation or spend relative to what we saw earlier in the year?

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Well, I think my comments on October from the script stand. You know we don't tend to provide in-quarter guidance or an in-quarter view other than our prepared remarks and so I guess I would stand by what I said in my prepared remarks. Golden Week was great and you've seen the rest of the -- you've seen the market wide October numbers in total. We feel fine with where we are in Macau.

Joe Greff
Analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Thank you.

Operator

Next we'll go to line of John DeCree from CBRE. Please go ahead.

John DeCree
Analyst at CBRE

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. Craig wanted to ask maybe specifically about Wynn Macau where the gaming business there has done quite well particularly this quarter, I think mass market table drop was up 10% and so a lot of discussion happens around Cotai, but curious as visitation recovers to Macau. If you could give us any insight or color as to what you're seeing on the Peninsula and at Wynn Macau.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure. I mean it's really a testament to our team. If you rewind a year or so ago, the team had identified a number of areas where we could improve the physical experience, the food and beverage experience. Really again kind of like I mentioned in my prepared remarks, focus on the things that we are really, really good at that we know, drive market share, they identified those and we've executed those over the course of the past year or so. It is a fact that the more visitation you have given the transient nature of the downtown customer that visitation will disproportionately benefit Wynn Macau. But I would put it much more down to execution and the execution that we have done over the course of the past year.

John DeCree
Analyst at CBRE

Thanks, Craig, that's helpful. And maybe a follow up on Las Vegas at table drop. I think you've mentioned in your prepared remarks that you're still seeing really healthy trends from the high end customer. But I think table drop was down a little. One of your peers talked about some big players that maybe didn't show up this quarter. And then you mentioned I think quarter to date and Vegas table drop is up. So wondering if you could give us a little bit more color on kind of what you're seeing in the high end table play. If there's kind of been any shift in customer trends from Q-on-Q or anything like that.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

No shifts of -- significant shifts of note. I guess let's put it in historical perspective. If you rewound the clock six, seven, eight years ago in Las Vegas, you had a business that was subject to a lot of volatility from very, very high end table players. And we've done a lot of very deliberate things over the course of the past X number of years, the past several years to really grow and diversify our casino business. We've stolen a lot of casino market share and we dampened the exposure to extreme high end volatility. And I think it shows in the numbers. But as it relates to any given quarter, sure, you could have one or two people that could impact table drop overall. But that's the beauty of the Las Vegas model, right? It's about diversification. So hotel revenue up, slot handle up, table drop you know, steady to down a couple points. Just it's not a broader trend, it's just part and parcel with running the business.

John DeCree
Analyst at CBRE

Sounds good. Thanks Craig, really appreciate it.

Operator

Thank you. Next we'll go to the line of Robin Farley from UBS. Please go ahead.

Robin Farley
Analyst at UBS Group

Oh, great, thanks. I guess it's kind of a follow up question on when you look at the gaming revenue decline in Vegas, was that just more your international VIP play or was there also some domestic, you know, sort of difficult comps making domestic gaming revenue down as well?

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Julie, you want to take that?

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure. Hi Robin. I'm happy to take that. Look, I think when you look at the comp there, you really have to take account of hold. So when you normalize the hold year-over-year, that makes a big difference to that calculation. So in terms of that implied increasing, if you think about contra revenue, the percentage of GGR. So first up, normalize for hold and then bear in mind that our ADRs have increased about 7% year-over-year. So that meaningfully increases the gap cost of the hotel rooms that go through that line. So when you take those two things into account, because we do that analysis all the time, you can really see there's no trend there. It's just a function of hold and higher ADR.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Yeah, I would just look at drop and handle, Robin. I mean drop year-over-year, drop down 4.4%, slot handle up 3.5%. So the 4.4% is kind of what I was talking about with the last question that I answered. That can be a couple people, but it's not really indicative of a broader trend. And you know, 3.5% in slots is great. So we feel great about where the gaming business is here. And again that high end consumer continues to hold in there.

Robin Farley
Analyst at UBS Group

Okay, thanks. Just as a follow up, you talked last quarter about your group business increasing. So wonder if you could sort of give us some outlook for group bookings for Q4 and for next year and yeah, just any comments on that, I guess.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure, happy to. Brian, you want to take that?

Brian Gullbrants
Chief Operating Officer, North America at Wynn Resorts

Sure, yeah. Robin, the outlook for group business remains quite healthy for the remainder of the year. And then we're pacing towards, as we've said before, a record year in room nights for this year at fairly strong ADRs. That's allowed us to build a really solid base for our team to yield manage the rest of the rooms and segments. And in terms of '25 as we look forward, we get to a point where as you book more and more group rooms, you can really start to crowd out the other valuable business. So particularly in a year where we'll have around 50,000 room nights out of service next year for our Encore Tower room renovation. So overall we expect '25 to look a lot like '24 in terms of group room nights. But we'll push on rate as our team knows how to do. So pacing quite well and pacing like we were this year.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Looking '25 looking like '24 by intention.

Brian Gullbrants
Chief Operating Officer, North America at Wynn Resorts

Correct.

Robin Farley
Analyst at UBS Group

Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Next we'll go to the line of Dan Politzer from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Dan Politzer
Analyst at Wells Fargo & Company

Hey, good afternoon everyone. You increased your share repurchase authorization this quarter pretty markedly. Can you talk about how you think about capital allocation? You know, if you're going to deploy that opportunistically or programmatic or and you know, along those lines how you think about your capex needs, both domestically as well as in Macau. Thanks.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure. I'll cover capital allocation theory and then Julie will cover capex. Opportunistically tends to be the name of the game for us. We're not programmatic buyers of the stock and we tend to buy back when we feel like the stock is particularly cheap. So you saw we purchased $118 million during the quarter. We continue to believe the stock looks attractive at current levels and that's why we raised the authorization. We're always balancing liquidity needs between capital deployment for growth like UAE, debt management. We've been delevering over the course of the past couple of years and then of course returning capital. Julie, do you want to cover major capex?

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure. And yeah, there's not a lot more to add versus what we said in our prepared remarks really because you know, we're now covering off Al Marjan, so I think we've given really clear numbers on Al Marjan. From a Vegas perspective, obviously we continue to invest here on maintenance and targeted high return projects. So on the project side, as I mentioned, we're renovating the remaining villas now that we've completed the renovation of the spa villas. We're continuing to enhance the food and beverage program with new offerings. So we have zero bond and we have a restaurant refresh with Fiola Mare which will be replacing Lakeside. We're also planning to renovate the Encore Tower hotel rooms during '25. So we expect total project capex for the remainder of '24 through '25 in Vegas to be in the neighborhood of $300 million. And outside of that Vegas, normal course maintenance capex of $75 million to $85 million.

Macau, I think I covered in the prepared remarks. We've taken that range down a little bit. Now we're getting closer. We're getting more certainty around numbers and also we're closer to that period as well. So that range has tightened a little bit on the concession commitments and then the maintenance capex in Macau continues to be, you know, normally we look at, you know, about $75 million for what's going on there.

Dan Politzer
Analyst at Wells Fargo & Company

Got it, thanks. And then just turning to Macau Wynn Palace, I think the mass gaming volumes or revenues there -- or volumes really were down a touch. Anything that's changed or evolved in terms of the environment on the ground as it relates to that property?

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

No, I don't think so. I think it's pretty consistent. All the remarks that we have made throughout the call regarding the state of Macau apply to Wynn Palace. So no, not really.

Dan Politzer
Analyst at Wells Fargo & Company

Thanks so much.

Operator

Thank you. Next we'll go to the line of Stephen Grambling from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Stephen Grambling
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Hey, thanks. Just a couple of follow ups on Macau as well. First, I think the RevPar for the hotels were down in both segments. Curious if there's anything to call out there. And then what are the expectations going forward on the hotel side? And I believe you also started to roll out smart tables early in the quarter. Are there any feedback on smart tables and the potential impact from those as we look into next year?

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure. Not much of a read through on RevPar because as you know it's essentially 100% -- close to 100% comp occupancy and we've been running very, very high occupancy levels. So not much of a read through there. On the smart table side, you're right. We are in the midst of, we are in the midst of rolling out smart tables. We've got about a quarter of our tables covered and we expect to have full rollout by Chinese New Year 2025. There's clearly benefits with respect to game security, prevention of human error, which we've talked about before and then there's a bunch of benefits on the marketing side primarily due to an abundance of very precise bet by bet data. We have a super clear view of how we intend to utilize that data and bring some innovative marketing forward to our customers. We're not obviously not going to talk about that on the call, but the real benefits of that require you to be at substantially complete rollout because you need a complete view of the customer. So a little too early to say at this point but we're on our way.

Stephen Grambling
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

So just to clarify, I guess when is that complete rollout is set now or you need to collect some data for a period of time...

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Next Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year 2025.

Stephen Grambling
Analyst at Morgan Stanley

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Next we'll go to line of David Katz from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

David Katz
Analyst at Jefferies Financial Group

Hi, good evening. Thanks for taking my questions. I'm not sure that there's been, you know, you've given expressed some confidence about Macau but you know, is there any specific evidence or you know, any impact from the stimulus so far that is discussable in this context and/or what drives the competence? Thanks.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

I think it's a little early to say if it's having an impact. Demand during October Golden Week was encouraging as I talked about in my prepared remarks. We're running 99% occupancy. But in the past and I would encourage you to look probably at early 2016 would be the most recent example of that stimulus and scale and you'll see that there was a pretty substantial positive impact on both visitation and GGR. But I think it's a bit early at this point to say if anything is cascading through Macau.

David Katz
Analyst at Jefferies Financial Group

Got it. And if I can ask just one follow up detail, along with the buyback, did you indicate whether the quarter ending share count is the same or whether you had acquired any quarter to date post the end of the quarter?

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Did not comment on the month of October or the first few days of November.

David Katz
Analyst at Jefferies Financial Group

Okay, thank you.

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Thanks David. Operator. We'll take one more caller.

Operator

Thank you. And our final question comes from the line of Brandt Montour from Barclays. Please go ahead.

Brandt Montour
Analyst at Barclays

Good evening everybody and afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I think Macau capex guidance went down from the prior range and I guess it was just more of a wider guesstimate before. But it's unusual we see capex expectations moving in that direction. Can you just comment on sort of what changed if you can from a competitive standpoint?

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Sure. And actually, Brandt, nothing's really changed in terms of the competitive standpoint. Really this is more about timing. We've made very certain commitments under our concession to the full capex and this is really about the timing of getting it done. And as I've mentioned, I think I'm using the same words every quarter about we're dependent on a number of approvals for land use in particular and you know, we don't have control over those. So that drives quite a wide range of outcomes in terms of capex. And we've been saying that for a while and talking about how much we'll spend through the remainder of '24 and '25. And you know, as we're getting closer to the end of that period, we've just tightened up that range. So nothing more to see than that. It just seemed unlikely that we were going to be able to get everything done in that time by the end of '25 given where we're at currently.

Brandt Montour
Analyst at Barclays

Okay, thanks for that. And then just a quick unrelated follow up on the New York licensure process if you have any thoughts on that and specifically with regards to one of your competitors making a comment about having some hesitation around iGaming legislation and if that has something that you guys weigh as well when you think about that opportunity.

Craig Billings
Chief Executive Officer at Wynn Resorts

Yeah, we sure do. I had heard about the comments and in fact I posted about this subject on LinkedIn back in March, I believe it was. First, look, I understand the desire for States to generate taxes quickly from online gaming, but there's very serious implications, honestly, primarily on the folks who the everyday folks who work in land based gaming and resorts resulting from any revenue declines due to cannibalization from online gaming. A 15% revenue decline is half your margin. So you're not going to employ nearly as many people to the extent that you're being affected by online gaming. Second, there's the potential for longer term regulatory blowback. And I think that's real, you know, as we've seen in markets around the world, look at Australia. I worked in the gaming market in Australia for a number of years. And when gaming proliferates to a certain point, there's societal and regulatory blowback. So, yeah, I think it's an issue. And then layer on top of that the fact that you're talking about deploying billions of dollars of capital and employing thousands of people. Yeah. It has to be something that you. Long answer, but yeah, we're watching it.

Brandt Montour
Analyst at Barclays

Okay, thanks for your thoughts.

Julie Cameron-Doe
Chief Financial Officer at Wynn Resorts

Well, thank you, Brandt. And thank you everybody. With that, we'll now close the call. We appreciate your interest in Wynn Resorts and we look forward to talking to you again next quarter.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]

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