Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited (MLCO) CEO Lawrence Ho on Q1 2022 Results - Earnings Call Transcript

Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited (NASDAQ:MLCO) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 5, 2022 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Lawrence Ho - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer

Geoff Davis - Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer

Jeanny Kim - Senior Vice President, Group Treasurer

Evan Winkler - Director

Conference Call Participants

Joe Greff - JP Morgan

Ricardo Chinchilla - Deutsche Bank

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in the First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call of Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the call, we will conduct a question and answer session. Today’s conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Ms. Jeanny Kim, Senior Vice President, Group Treasurer of Melco Resorts & Entertainment Limited.

Jeanny Kim

Thank you operator. Thank you for joining us today for our first quarter 2022 earnings call. On the call are Lawrence Ho, Geoff Davis, Evan Winkler and our property residents in Macau, Manila and Cyprus.

Before we get started, please note that today’s discussion may contain forward-looking statements made under the Safe Harbor provision of federal securities laws. Our actual results could differ from our anticipated results. In addition, we may discuss non-GAAP measures. A definition and reconciliation of each of these measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the earnings release. Finally, please note that our supplementary earnings slides are posted on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I’ll now turn it over to Mr. Lawrence Ho.

Lawrence Ho

Thank you Jeanny. Our results for the first quarter of 2022 continue to reflect the impact of the COVID pandemic. We saw relatively solid performance across all of our segments over the Chinese New Year holiday period. But an increase in COVID cases in China and tighter border controls led to Macau GGR falling more than 50% from February to March 2022 and negatively impacted our results for the remainder of the first quarter.

Disciplined liquidity management remains a key area of focus. Total debt increased by $1.3 billion year-on-year as we increased available liquidity to support our operations and ongoing development projects. We will be prudent in managing our balance sheet and liquidity profile as we manage the business through this challenging environment. In the Philippines, we have been operating our casinos at 100% capacity since March 1 when the COVID alert level was reduced to alert level one.