Century Casinos, Inc. (NASDAQ:CNTY) Q1 2024 Results Conference Call May 9, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Peter Hoetzinger - Co-CEO & President
Erwin Haitzmann - Co-CEO
Margaret Stapleton - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Jeff Stantial - Stifel
Jordan Bender - Citizens JMP
Chad Beynon - Macquarie

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to today's Century Casino's Q1 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this call is being recorded. And I will be standing by should you need any assistance.

It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Peter Hoetzinger. Please go ahead.

Peter Hoetzinger

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our earnings call. We would like to remind you that we will be discussing forward-looking information, which involves risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from our forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

We provide a discussion of the risk factors in our SEC filings and encourage you to review these filings.

Throughout our call, we'll refer to several non-GAAP financial measures, including, but not limited to, adjusted EBITDA. Reconciliations of our non-GAAP measures to the appropriate GAAP measures can be found in our news releases and SEC filings available in the Investors section of our website at cnty.com.

I'll now provide an overview of the first quarter 2024 results as well as our outlook for this and next year. After that, my co-CEO, Erwin Haitzmann, and our CFO, Margaret Stapleton, will join me for a Q&A session.

For the quarter, we delivered net revenue of $136 million, an increase of 25% over Q1 of last year. The increase came from the additions of the Nugget in Nevada and Rocky Gap in Maryland, as well as good performances of our Canadian operations, offset by extremely bad weather, a weaker retail customer, construction disruption at a few properties and the temporary closures of 3 casinos in Poland.

Adjusted EBITDA was $21 million, down 18% from last year. The U.S. operations were flat and Canada was up, but Poland and the Corporate segment were down. So it was a rather challenging start to the New Year.

While we knew our performance was comping to a strong first quarter of '23, the results were also impacted by severe winter weather. As you've heard from others in regional casinos, January was essentially wiped out because of weather. And because most of our casinos are located outside of major cities in destination areas such as Rocky Gap, Mountaineer, Century City or Cripple Creek and [indiscernible] Caruthersville, our customers need to drive half an hour, an hour, or more outside of city lights and urban streets. You can imagine the dramatic impact winter storms with unsafe driving conditions have on this situation.