Earnings Labs

Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. (LYV)

Q1 2008 Earnings Call· Mon, May 26, 2008

$152.65

-1.36%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome everyone to the Live Nation first quarter 2008 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Before we begin, Live Nation has asked me to remind you that this afternoon's call will contain certain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to Live Nation's SEC filings for a description of risks and uncertainties that could impact the actual results. Live Nation will also refer to some non-GAAP measures in this call. In accordance with SEC Regulation G, Live Nation has provided a full reconciliation for the most comparable GAAP in the earnings release on their website. The release reconciliation and other financial or statistical information to be discussed on this call can be found on LiveNation.com under the About Us section. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to Michael Rapino, Chief Executive Officer.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Welcome to our 2008 first quarter conference call. On today's call I'll provide a summary of Live Nation's strategic progress, and then Kathy Willard, our Chief Financial Officer, will provide commentary on our financials. During the first quarter we continued to execute on our strategic plan to maximize our concert platform and fully capitalize on our global leadership position in the live music business. Our mission is to create a company that acquires and distributes live artists' rights with discipline, innovation and accountability while maximizing shareholder value. Our competitive advantage lies in our global concert platform that spans multiple cities throughout 19 countries, staffed by the most experienced promoters and marketing personnel in the business, selling directly to over 40 million fans, servicing 1,000 artists annually through our 16,000 concerts. Our focus for 2008 is very clear. We are continuing to concentrate on three main priorities - optimization and expansion of our core distribution platform, investing in and developing our online ticketing platform for our 2009 launch, and reducing debt through additional sales of non-core businesses. During the quarter we made great progress and are on plan regarding our ticketing build out. The core operational team is hired and in place. The CTS system is now deployed in our data center and hardware in North America. CTS continues its development work to adapt the system to market, however our team is already building events, selling, printing and scanning tickets. We continue to refine our North American platform by exiting low-growth markets and expanding in the top 20 markets. The agreement to acquire the majority of the live music assets of Fantasma Production, a leading Florida-based promotion company, is part of this growth. The acquisition includes Fantasma's calendar events, two important outdoor midsize music venues, and two outdoor music festivals, significantly…

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

In our first quarter earnings release today, we begin presenting adjusted operating income or loss on a consolidated basis and also by segment. Adjusted operating income or loss is a non-GAAP financial measure that the company defines as operating income or loss before depreciation and amortization, loss or gain on sale of operating assets, and noncash compensation expense. We are reporting adjusted operating income or loss in place of adjusted OIBDAN, which we have used in the past. This change was driven by feedback from investors, and we believe that using adjusted operating income or loss will be a simpler way to communicate our financial progress. There is no change in the calculation. We are simply changing the term, and this calculation may be similar to how some calculate EBITDA. Moving to our results, during the first quarter consolidated revenue increased $116.2 million, or 22% compared to the same period last year. The increase was primarily driven by a $15.5 million revenue increase from increased ticket revenues due to strong arena acts and improved results at promoted midsize music venues, as a result of higher attendance, increased show count, and higher average ticket prices for North American Music. Acquisitions accounted for $75.5 million of the increase and included $35.2 million from HOB Canada in North American Music, $16 million from AMG and Heineken Music Hall in International Music, and $24.3 million from Signatures and Anthill in Global Artists. In addition, we benefited from an increase of $10.8 million related to foreign exchange movement. For the first quarter of 2008, our adjusted operating loss was $2.1 million, an improvement of $0.7 million compared to an adjusted operating loss of $2.8 million during the first quarter of last year. The decrease in adjusted operating loss was primarily driven by a $1.6 million…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Mark Wienkes - Goldman Sachs.

Mark Wienkes - Goldman Sachs

Analyst

Just wondering, today on Warner Music Group's call they talked about moving away from 360-degree deals. Have you seen that in the marketplace? What are you noticing when you're talking to the artists about these deals? And then also, for Kathy, could you detail the free cash balance for us?

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

There's a lot of talk on what is a 360 deal. We don't really use that terminology. We're in a very different business model than the records' 360 model. We business model is because we have the infrastructure, we have a merchandise company, we have a fan club company, we have a ticket company, a sponsorship division, a fan club, a VIP division, our goal is just to acquire all of those rights that we have infrastructure for to maximize our revenues. So as we said, we're going to sign over 1,000 rights this year, whether that's a T-shirt, that fan club rate or a merchandise right. That's our core strategy. Every now and then the Madonna's and the U2's will look to us and say, "We'd like to do all of that, and let's do it for a long-term period." And if the economics work for our pipe, then we'll look at that model. As much press as we've received, all of my intelligence tells me if you added up right now the record labels that I talk to, we have three what you would call 360 deals. I think they have somewhere in the 100 range on 360 deals because they're doing them with every young artist that’s out there. So from what I hear there's more and more attention every day to a longer, deeper relationship with the record label or ourselves, and we have a lot of artists who are asking us daily about is there a new way to be a business partner long term since we're probably going to be their touring partner.

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

On the free cash calculation which we've used in the past, which is our cash balance less deferred revenue plus prepaids to artists and less tickets sold to others, that balance is about $10 million at the end of the quarter, Mark.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from David Joyce - Miller Tabak & Co., LLC. David Joyce - Miller Tabak & Co., LLC: I was wondering if you could sort of give some color around why the average revenue per attendee was so strong. Is it for a particular kind of venue or just if you could discuss that?

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

And you understand, David, that number is calculated based on total revenue divided by attendees for the quarter? David Joyce - Miller Tabak & Co., LLC: Yes. Is it the - I was looking for the other disclosure that you had been providing, but I guess it's not there now. Is that going to be in a 10Q on all the events and attendees?

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Yes. You'll be to divide it out and look on some of the North American show count versus revenue increases. Our goal in this release, we listened to a lot of investors and a lot of input on how do we get a release with a lot of tentacles to our model? How do we simplify the model, and how do we provide the Street with the key metrics that, if you look at those key eight metrics, if those are going up, our business is doing well and we're on our growth plan. So we tried to distill to a very top line but an important eight lines that says these are the eight things that fill the pipe and the cost to fill the pipe and then the ultimate cost per fan or revenue per fan. And we'll provide you more detail in the summer when we get into a lot more ancillary revenue per fan. David Joyce - Miller Tabak & Co., LLC: And Kathy, did you mention $150 million of venue expansion expense this year?

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, that's correct. David Joyce - Miller Tabak & Co., LLC: And you only did $17 million so far?

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

That's correct. Most of it's going to come in second and third and fourth.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Which we've announced the House of Blues Boston, the House of Blues Houston, The Point in Ireland, which will be a fabulous venue.

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

Ticketing and then three AMG venues.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Ticketing and three midsize venues in London that are all in varying degrees of progression to come online end of year, beginning of next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Tuna Amobi - Standard & Poors. Tuna Amobi - Standard & Poors: I guess my first question, I was kind of writing furiously on the Jay-Z deal, Michael, as you were going through some of the details, and just wanted to make sure I understand the numbers. So when you talk about $340 million, right, is that like kind of the base case scenario? I'm just trying to understand what additional parameters could swing that number one way or the other.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

When we built our 10-year models for these artists, someone like JayZ or Madonna or U2 have incredible long history, so the historic numbers are fairly easy to dig through to build a forward model. So we use all historic years of everything Jay-Z's ever done historically for years, how many T-shirts, how many concert tickets, how many fan club members, how many sponsorships. We would take all the historic data and then we would apply a discount factor to it for the future, and we would build a model that is a very base case conservative model that we would have presented to your. $340 is a very conservative revenue number that we will absolutely stand behind over the 10-year period. We have absolutely higher expectations as we unlock more and more sponsorship revenue and ticketing online opportunities. But the model right now is just based on a historic performance discounted going forward, so we have a [inaudible] history and said, "Jay's going to sell more records in Year 8 than he sold last year." And the greatest part about the JayZ model, a lot of people don't understand the power and the iconic state he has become in that genre of music. Our model built his historic touring performance and he just blew by every historic number he's ever done in history on this tour by being the largest single tour he's done in history, the largest arena tour of the year, and he's got a full year ahead of him. And we would assume he has got another 10 years of that and more in terms of his potential and his touring power. Tuna Amobi - Standard & Poors: What's the start date actually for this deal?

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Well, we closed the deal on last Friday.

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

A week ago.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

So we closed Friday, but we included all of the tour that started before the closing in this deal. Tuna Amobi - Standard & Poors: Okay, so the tour is included? That's what I was getting at.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

That was the big win on, how do we get these deals so they're accretive day one and cash flowing instantly. Tuna Amobi - Standard & Poors: Okay, so just still on that theme, would you say, I mean, this is kind of the template that you would use? Because as I look at base side by side with the Madonna deal, there seems to be some differences, a few subtle differences. So I'm just kind of trying to draw comparisons in terms of the potential numbers what this might mean. I know you talked about 11% margin and Jay-Z's deal included entrepreneurial ventures and Madonna's did not, so I am trying to kind of compare what you think are the - which one would you say is the template in terms of your target numbers, what you're trying to accomplish in margin terms and return on investment, etc.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

We had started the year by saying that we believed that there was a model, and the reason we provided a lot of context today is over the last few months the deals got a lot of press because it's easy for someone to talk about a $100 million JayZ deal. But out of context, we have to step back and go, "That's the business we're in." We advance artists for rights every day of the week. We do it for, we spend over $1.5 billion a year just on artists' rights a year, advancing an artist well in advance of his performance a guaranteed number, and then we recoup that through the performance. So we do this for a living. If we've been advancing Jay-Z over history and certain dates, when we bought a show in Chicago or bought five dates in London, our model is are there opportunities to take that $30 billion we're going to spend in 16,000 rights a year, fragmented pieces, which right now produce a 4% return, if we can model out business cases with artists that we believe have a strong touring future and can feed our distribution pipe and we can put together a 10-year model of touring and then extra rights, the return on capital and margin higher than our current 4%, that's a great model for us. If we could convert a lot of our artists into 11% margin, then we start to answer that question on how do we turn our business from 4% and how do we grow it. So our model is, we said at the beginning of the year we were going to go out with three or four founding artists U2, Madonna, Jay-Z and another one to come in terms of issuing some stock to…

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from [Alan Gold]. [Alan Gold]: Following up on the Jay-Z contract, Kathy, could you just work through how that would run through the income statement and how the cash would be laid out?

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

No. We're not going to provide that detail today. The cash outlay is a combination of the activity. So we happen to be in cycle right now, so we do have a tour so we've advanced some cash for the tour rights. We have websites going and sponsorship and fan clubs.

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

And it would go through our prepaids just like they always do on artist advances. And the revenue and operating income that Michael spoke of would be going through our financial statements over the 10year term. [Alan Gold]: So whatever percent of that - whatever revenue comes in at about an 11% margin would be a good way to look at it right now?

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

Yes.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Yes. The revenue's going to come in. Some of it's a tour in North America. Some comes in Signatures, through merchandise. Some come in through Music Today for fan clubs. Some's going to come in our ticketing. But cumulatively, those 10 rights will split out somewhere in the $340 minimum revenue, the EBITDA we gave you, and that margin in our fragmented distribution pipe.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Julie Heckman - Morgan Joseph & Co. Julie Heckman - Morgan Joseph & Co.: Okay, first off, can you explain the Citi deal in a little more detail, give a little more color?

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Sure. As we've kind of put some context around today, we have a very large global sponsorship division that is every day doing local deals. It might be signage in an amphitheater. It might be an on-site display. And historically we have sold a lot of local and regional sponsorship deals mostly based on a venue on-site platform. One of the advantages over the last year is we've moved into having an online platform, having direct access to consumers, having a database, having access to tickets and now access to T-shirts and artists' rights. Our national sponsorship team has had incredible conversations with a lot of great companies on can they use our tickets, can they use our exclusive T-shirts, our VIP clubs, all of the great content we have to help drive their business model. And Citi would be the first deal where we would say is a demonstration that the sponsorship community is excited about our new platform of concerts, online ticketing and artist rights. And we took our average credit card category, where we've historically been with American Express, and we took that category and doubled it three or four times in terms of annual EBITDA that somebody was willing to pay us for access to our content. So Citi now has an incredible global database. They're helping market our shows and they have access to tickets and various exclusive content over the term to offer to their Citi cardholders. So we are very excited from a multi-marketing perspective, a cash flow perspective, and we think there are more Citibanks that will come to our platform over the next year as kind of our official sponsors. And Citibank's only a North American deal, so we have a similar situation in Europe on all of our content. Julie Heckman - Morgan Joseph & Co.: And are there any updates to guidance in 2008? Can you just run through your expectations for the year again?

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

No, we think we did a little bit of soft guidance on the first Q to help out everybody. We gave you a fairly good range on what we believe we will deliver this year from an EBITDA perspective. To date, half of my job is buying the talent. Now the second part is them coming to the shows and buying beers and parking and spending money. So the good news is on a Q1 we can say to you we feel very confident that we have the content to deliver our plan this year. We hope now that it's summer and it's hot and everybody drinks a lot of pop and beer and shows up, and as long as all of those 46 million fans come through the pipes and drink and eat and partake as expected, we believe we are absolutely on plan to the guidance we provided in Q1. By the Q2 we will have a closer idea on where we are. And as any of you have followed, the Q1 and Q2 are really not really relevant to the year. This is a Q3 make or break business where we do a majority of all of our business. So right now we feel great about Q3. We've got the inventory on a global basis, and we have all the levers in place to deliver what we think is a strong year. Julie Heckman - Morgan Joseph & Co.: Kathy, could you break out the $131 million of [elimination] revenue? I think some of it was feeder, but is there anything else in there?

Kathy Willard

Chief Financial Officer

We don't provide that detail specifically, but the main pieces that are included in there are Motor Sports and the U.K. theater business.

Operator

Operator

This does conclude our Q&A session.

Michael Rapino

Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, everyone. Have a good summer.