Allied Esports Entertainment Inc.
Q4 2019 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 17 Mar 2020

[Operator:]

Greetings. Welcome to the Allied Esports Entertainment's Fourth Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions]. Please note this conference is being recorded.It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Lasse Glassen with Investor Relations for Allied ESports Entertainment. Please go ahead.

[Lasse Glassen:]

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to Allied Esports Entertainment's 2019 fourth quarter and full year results conference call. Speaking on the call today is Allied Esports Entertainment's Chief Executive Officer, Frank Ng; and Chief Financial Officer, Tony Hung; the Company's President and longtime WPT CEO, Adam Pliska; and Jud Hannigan, who is leading the Esports operations is also available for the question-and-answer session.Before I turn the call over to management, please remember that our prepared remarks and responses to questions may contain forward looking statements. Words such as may, will, expect intend, plan, believe, seek, could, estimate, judge, targeting, should, anticipate, goal and variations of these words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from those implied by such forward-looking statements, due to a variety of factors discussed in the company's public filings, including the risk factors in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Although the company believes these expectations reflect it and such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be attained. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.In addition, certain of the information presented in this call represents non-GAAP financial measures. The company's earnings release, which was issued this afternoon and is available on the company's website, presents reconciliations to the appropriate GAAP measure and an explanation of why the company believes that non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors.With that, it's now my pleasure to turn the call over to Allied Esports Entertainment’s CEO Frank Ng. Frank?

[Frank Ng:]

Thank you, Lasse. And thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. I will begin today's call with a review of our operational highlights for the fourth quarter and full year 2019. Tony Hung, our CFO, will follow by providing additional details on the company's fourth quarter and full year financials results. After our prepared remarks, we will open up the call to your questions.Allied Esports Entertainment wrapped up a transformational year that included a strong fourth quarter highlighted by robust top-line growth and continued execution of our strategic initiatives to help business expand into quarters and years ahead. Fourth quarter total revenues of $6.5 million increased 19.5% compared with the fourth quarter last year, driven by growth in both our Esports and Poker businesses. Our excellent fourth quarter results capped off with an impressive performance for the full year which included a 26.5% increase in total revenue along with a 38% improvement in adjusted EBITDA from a year ago.In addition to our strong financial performance, we also continued to make great progress with our existing partnership with Simon Property, and TV Azteca. And with this momentum, we announced a new relationship with Brookfield Properties.With significant and rapidly growing revenues and numerous key strategic partnerships, Allied Esports Entertainment continues to carve out a valuable position in the exciting and voyaging esports industry. At the same time, World Poker Tour, or WPT continues to steadily grow its business and has a very promising outlook. In fact, a number of factors are coming together that gives us confidence that the future of WPT has never been brighter.With respect to esports our focus is not about publishing games or owning teams. In fact, we believe the best opportunity is to drive sustainable and scalable growth through targeting the general populations of gamers and complementing game publishers by catering to the entertainment aspect of esports. As such, our strategy has been built around three strategic pillars, which are

[Tony Hung:]

Thank you, Frank. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. As Frank mentioned, we ended the year with strong growth in each of our key strategic pillars and laid the groundwork with our strategic partnerships, which have now expanded to include Brookfield to go along with Simon and TV Azteca. We've also been very busy working on strengthening our capital structure and liquidity, which I will talk in more detail in a moment.Now. turning to the fourth quarter and full year 2019 results in more detail. We had a strong fourth quarter and an even stronger full year. Total revenues for the fourth quarter were $6.5 million, up 19% year-over-year. For the full year total revenues were $26.1 million, an increase of 27% year-over-year, driven by growth in all three key strategic pillars. Looking at these results in greater detail, in-person revenues for the fourth quarter totaled $2.2 million, compared to $2.1 million in the prior year period, an increase of 6% year-over-year. In-person revenue increased year-over-year in our Allied Esports business but was slightly offset by lower Poker event revenues primarily due to timing issues.Multiplatform content revenues totaled $2 million compared to $1.1 million in the prior year period, an increase of 74% year-over-year. Our year-over-year revenue growth was primarily driven by increased sponsorship revenues in the WPT business, as well as higher WPT distribution revenues and music royalties.Interactive revenues totaled $2.3 million compared to $2.2 million in the prior year period, an increase of 4% year-over-year, driven by increased subscriptions and virtual product purchases related to the WPT business.Overall, fourth quarter total revenues derived from Allied Esports grew to $2 million in 2019 as compared to $1.4 million in the same period in 2018, largely a result of increased revenues at the HyperX Esports Arena Las Vegas, as well as increased revenues from the company's gaming truck event.Revenues from WPT increased to $4.5 million in Q4 2019 versus $4 million in Q4 the prior year period, driven primarily by growth in sponsorship and distribution. For the full year 2019, total revenues derived from Allied Esports grew $3.3 million as compared to last year. And revenues from WPT increased $2.2 million compared to last year.Total costs and expenses for the fourth quarter were $11.6 million, flat compared to the prior year period. Costs and expenses in 2019 benefited from lower impairment expense versus the prior year period. This was offset by increased in-person expenses due to our Simon Cup event in Q4 2019 and higher SG&A as a result of becoming a public company.Net loss attributed to Allied Esports Entertainment for the fourth quarter was $5.8 million, an improvement from a net loss of $6.6 million in the fourth quarter last year.And now turning to our balance sheet in detail. At December 31, 2019, our cash position totaled $12.1 million, including $3.7 million of restricted cash, compared to $10.5 million at December 31, 2018. Year-over-year, the increased cash balance was due to proceeds from the merger transaction and excludes an additional $5 million we raised through selling common shares to Brookfield in January. Total convertible debt was $14 million at December 31, 2019.At the end of February, we also announced that Lyle Berman, Chairman of the Board of Directors has committed to purchase 2 million of newly issued shares of Allied Esports common stock through our exercising an option on March 9th. The proceeds from the stock sale will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes.Finally, I would like to spend a moment to discuss the global health crisis. We are deeply concerned for the wellbeing of those affected. We have a strong network of employees and partners across the globe and it is our top priority to ensure the health of our colleagues and make sure they stay safe as they deal with this very difficult situation.To date, we've had to cancel or postpone some WPT and esports events as a result of the coronavirus. Fortunately, this has been isolated to our pillar one business and our pillar two, pillar three businesses remain relatively unaffected. In fact, with traditional sporting events canceled, we anticipate increased demand in pillar two and pillar three for esports content and online esports events.We are currently realigning our resources to accommodate the change and have began to leverage our infrastructure and daily programming to make our esports tournaments available online, kicking off with an event this past weekend. For WPT we recently transitioned what would have previously been a physical event to the first WPT online series that will take place exclusively on the party poker online platform in May. We believe this will prove to be a model for more online events to come, and we'll continue to monitor the situation closely as it unfolds.In summary, we are pleased with the performance of both Allied Esports and WPT, the strength and expansion of our strategic alliances and the progress we're making on our key strategic pillars. Looking forward to 2020 we have a lot of runway for growth and have been involved in in-depth discussions with multiple parties to strengthen our balance sheet and pave the way for future success.We will now open the line for Q&A. operator?

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Jeff Cohen with Stephens. Please go ahead.

[Jeff Cohen:]

So you hosted 78 events to pyramid this quarter. Could you maybe talk about where that number is against where it’s likely to ultimately be? And then maybe how does that 78 breakdown between tail-end events versus kind of the weekly community events that you run? And where would you expect that engaged ratio to your trend long-term?

[Jud Hannigan:]

Sure. Thanks, Jeff, this is Jud Hannigan. So, the 78 events we had in Q4, these were the total events, our proprietary events out of that number were just over 60 and with the rest being third-party events that happened -- that took place in the arena. I think as we look forward in the operation of our venues, we're going to begin to layer on multiple events per day. And we think that there is a lot of opportunity as we look to do that. Our current plans call for rolling that out this summer where we begin to layer in multiple events per day, which will increase the total number of events that we can do from a proprietary standpoint.

[Frank Ng:]

And holistically these are very important for the company because they not only serve our first pillar, eventually, once we have the content play, and also the last pillar, these events will be integrated with the online experiences as well. And as a matter of fact, we have started that process of extending some of those game plays starting this week, and make them online as well.

[Jeff Cohen:]

Thanks, guys. And then just one quickly for Tony. Can you maybe talk about any cost cutting measures you guys are looking just to kind of preserve cash, given the economic outlook, or maybe just a timeline of when we can expect EBITDA breakeven? Thanks.

[Tony Hung:]

Sure, Jeff. Let me let me take first part first. Obviously with everything going on right now with the coronavirus, it's a pretty fluid situation. So we're actively looking at a variety of different measures and you'll start to see some coming soon. And then as far as the cash burn is concerned, as we currently stand right now, we have runway to carry us until our debt comes due in August of this year.

[Operator:]

[Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from Derek Soderberg with Dougherty and Company. Please go ahead.

[Derek Soderberg:]

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I want to start off with Frank here. I'm wondering if you guys could give us a little bit more detail on the impact of the coronavirus on maybe some foot traffic or utilization at your Las Vegas location and also at your affiliate partners? And then also maybe give us a sense for how the virus has impacted any of your arena developments with your partners? Thanks.

[Frank Ng:]

Yes, let me start first, maybe Tony can add some more at the end of it too. I would say out of the three pillars, the first pillar will have impact. But I believe -- we strongly believe that impact will be temporary. Because for example, like World Poker Tour, we do have cancellations, but the number of cancellations so far is very minimum. Majority of that actually is pushing back the schedule and have the events later part of this year when things are clearing up. And like Vegas, the locations we have at all the affiliate partners, we actually have dedicated a purpose-built plug-and-play arena. And we do foresee even at the first pillar level, when things running good as we move along, we will be quickly recovered by having a lot of big publishers, they need to catch up on their lead, their schedules, and we're the most ready to help them to achieve that purposes.So for the short-term, yes I think we will see some impact on first pillar. But second pillar, third pillar, we actually have high hopes that, that should be moving in the right direction, because people are staying home, getting online, watching more content. And we're in the process of realigning the company resources for that purposes right now. We have something exciting to share with everybody very soon.

[Tony Hung:]

And then Derek, this is a Tony. Just to add a little bit to what Frank was saying. So throwing some numbers around it, if you focus on the esports side of it, because I think WPT should be relatively unaffected as Frank was saying. On the esports side, if you look at 2019, we did about $7.5 million of revenues. And if you divide that on a weekly basis, you're looking at about $140,000, $144,000 of revenues per week. So that should give you a rough sense.Now, just to highlight a little bit more on that, as you know, we have a variety of different revenue streams. And so some of them will be impacted, obviously, like food and beverage. But others, such as sponsorship should be relatively unimpacted. And then obviously, we also have gaming and ticketing, which is, you heard us say earlier, that's actually going to be moved to an online event. So we hope to be able to offset some of the losses there to be able to supplement in other areas with online events and with online content.And then from an EBITDA standpoint, as opposed to revenues, it shouldn't have as much impact there as well.

[Derek Soderberg:]

Okay, great. And in the past, you guys have kind of spoken to a really strong pipeline of interested, potential customers rolling out arenas, has the virus impacted those talks at all? Maybe not specifically, Simon or Brookfield those seem to be on track. But any additional color on some of the conversations you've had with potential customers? And if that's -- if the virus has maybe pushed out some of those opportunities, I guess.

[Jud Hannigan:]

Hey, Derek, this is Jud again. Happy to answer that one for you. Yes, we've been speaking with folks all over the world about the -- their plans to open and operate arenas and how we can support that as part of our affiliate program. Our first -- as Frank alluded to earlier, our first arena in Australia and New Zealand, opened up this past Friday in Melbourne. So we're excited that, that has opened their doors. And yes, look, the impact of this, I think everybody is -- it's affecting the world, everywhere, globally, in different ways. And the responses locally in those markets have been very different. So we'll continue to monitor but the interest is still there, and I think to what Tony and Frank were saying earlier, I think there's a -- if they are at the timeout pushing it back, not necessarily abandoning those plans. So the conversations are still ongoing and quite active.

[Derek Soderberg:]

And then as a final question, I think on the last call, you guys kind of pointed to some industry growth rates around 20%. And I think you guys alluded to maybe that's a good number to go off of. Is that still the case or, the virus kind of impacted that at all?

[Jud Hannigan:]

Yes, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think right now, it's a little early to tell. Obviously, we're going to be monitoring the situation very closely. And as you said, it is a very fluid situation. But as far as our opinion right now, yes, we believe that, that industry growth still is relevant for us.

[Tony Hung:]

Yes, and I would make a guess that the industry numbers would go up. This is actually the moment that the industry may pick up some benefit out of this because people are staying home and we see a number has been breaking records now.

[Operator:]

Thank you. I would like to turn the floor over to management for closing comments.

[Frank Ng:]

Okay, great. So thank you operator and thank you to those on the phone for your support and participation in today's call. We hope you all have a great day.

[Operator:]

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.