RCI Hospitality Holdings Inc (RICK) 2014 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Rick's Cabaret first-quarter 2014 conference call and webcast. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over your host, Mr. Gary Fishman. Thank you, sir. You may begin.

Thank you. I just wanted to remind everybody that our Safe Harbor statement is posted at the beginning of our conference call presentation. It reminds you that you may hear or see forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. I urge you to read it.

Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated, and we disclaim any obligation to update information disclosed in this call as a result of developments which occur afterward. I also urge you to read the explanation of non-GAAP and adjusted EBITDA measurements that we use and that are included in our presentation and news release.

Finally, I'd like to invite everyone in the New York City area to stop by Rick's Cabaret tonight at 6:30 PM at 50 W. 33rd Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. It's a great way to get a first-hand, behind-the-scenes look at one of our flagship clubs. If you haven't RSVPed, just ask for me by name at the door.

Now here is Eric Langan, President and CEO of Rick's. Eric?

Thanks, Gary. Thank you for joining us today. Also on the line with me is Ed Anakar, our Director of Operations; and Phil Marshall, our CFO.

To get started, please turn to slide 4. We'll begin today with a review of our first-quarter income statement and balance sheet, and then we'll update you on the successful launch of Vivid Cabaret in New York and tell you how well we're doing so far in the second quarter. We'll also update you with our plans for rolling out new restaurant/sports bars and the REIT that we're working on and give you a picture of how everything fits together. Finally, we'll wrap up with our reiteration of guidance and a question-and-answer session.

And if you turn to slide 5: revenue came in as indicated earlier last month. They were up 8.4% or close to $30 million, which we are very pleased with. However, the severe winter weather in mid-December in Texas cost us at least $0.5 million in sales. Of that, about 80% would have likely contributed to operating profit.

As a result, we earned slightly less than a year ago: net income of $2.4 million or $0.25 a share. This compares to $2.6 million or $0.28 a share a year ago.

With the exception of the bad weather, sales trends were very good. Units opened less than a year contributed more than 8% of our growth, while units opened more than a year added 0.3%, returning us to positive same-store sales growth. Because 75% of our units are in Texas, they were the most affected by the weather.

Looking at October and November only, same-store sales were averaging increases of more than 4%. In addition, during the quarter we had expenses associated with developing five units, two of which opened in January. This includes the new Vivid Cabaret in New York, which is a very large part of those expenses.

The first quarter also experienced an anticipated bump in our Rick's Cabaret New York rent. The rent went from $180,000 -- went up to $180,000 a month in October from $60,000 a month in September; but due to our sale of air rights, we were able to reduce it starting in November to $100,000 a month. We also had $120,000 in one-time legal settlement costs.

As a final point, I'd like to note that cash generation remained very strong during the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $7.3 million, about level with a year ago.

If you turn to slide 6 for a review of our balance sheet, shareholder equity hit a record $100.1 million, up from $97.1 million as of September 30. Total assets hit $230 million, up from $223 million.

Major items during the quarter included raising $7 million in new debt, which helped to buy the New York City air rights and lowered our rent there, and the construction costs on Vivid Cabaret New York. We also paid down $1.7 million of other debt, including $800,000 on the Tootsie's-related note, which is our most expensive at 14%. We now only have $4.5 million remaining on the Tootsie's debt.

Please turn to slide 7. I'm very pleased to report that sales for the second quarter to date are up strongly, with year-over-year sales up in the high teens for January and same-store sales trending up more than 4%. This was due to four factors. One is the opening of the Vivid Cabaret in New York in mid-January.

Ed Anakar and his team did a terrific job of opening that location. Ed, would you like to say a few words?

Yes, Eric. Thank you. Vivid received tremendous opening-related publicity, and the traffic has been incredible. At some moments it was literally wall-to-wall customers and entertainers. And since the grand opening events and the big game weekend, performance has continued to do well. We truly believe that this new location has the potential to become one of our top clubs. Back to you, Eric.

Thanks. Ed will be joining us during the question-and-answer session, if anyone has additional questions for him.

A second reason for the great results so far in the second quarter is the opening of our second Bombshells, this one in Webster, a suburb southeast of Houston, near NASA. David Simmons and his team did an equally excellent job of getting it ready.

A third factor was the overall beneficial effects of the pro football championship, in particular on Rick's and Vivid in New York City. Anybody who was in Manhattan for the two weeks leading up to the big game had to be impressed with all the traffic in our clubs and the parties. We took full advantage of that and benefited financially and strategically in developing customers and building our reputation.

Lastly, as of the first quarter, we had nine units open less than 12 months. As the quarters progress, they are getting better at building their businesses.

Please turn to slide 8. We hope you like this slide. We wanted to give you a more graphic description of why we're so excited about this year and next. As you can see, we are building up a number of new units, both adult clubs and restaurants/sports bars.

For the balance of fiscal 2014, we have at least four more units in active development. As it happens, all of them happen to be in Texas. First, the Rick's Cabaret in Odessa, where we are still waiting for our final permit to build our well, so we can get that location open; the Bombshells in Austin, which construction began in January, and our target is to open that location sometime in May; our Bombshells in Beaumont, where we are in the process of refining our exact plans; and a Bombshells in South Houston, which we announced -- signed the lease in late January.

We are continuing to work on additional restaurants and sports bar locations. Our objective is to have a total of 10 sports bar/restaurants concepts open or in development by year-end calendar 2014, with a cluster in Texas and others, possibly, in select cities elsewhere having significant tourist or convention traffic. We continue to work on new adult club opportunities as well. With regards to acquisitions, we don't have anything we can report at this time, but we continue to talk with many parties in the industry and hope to have something soon.

If you turn to slide number 9, as many of you know, we like to own our real estate for many of our adult clubs. Rules require that the license to be physically tied to the location. Owning this real estate makes our income statement and balance sheet look very different from other fast-growing restaurant bar chains.

To solve this problem, we've been exploring the concept of developing a private real estate investment trust. We are currently in a process of drafting documents to create such an entity.

Our thinking is Rick's would own 9.9% of the real estate investment trust. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Rick's would enter into a contract to manage the assets of the REIT. Rick's would then expect to sell its real estate, which has an estimated market value of approximately $85 million and an equity value of approximately $40 million, to the REIT.

The potential benefits could result in a major favorable liquidity event for Rick's. It would create a war chest for making acquisitions and other growth opportunities happen. It would eliminate most of the depreciation and amortization charges on our income statement.

In turn, this would result in Rick's being more of an operating company with a significantly higher return on equity. And that would make us much more comparable to other publicly-traded bar and restaurant chains.

Turning to slide 10, we put this slide in for informational purposes, showing you that we have $11.7 million of convertible debt in four tranches. We have forced conversion prices on these tranches that range from $13 to $16.25. If our stock trades at any of these particular prices for 20 days, we could force conversion on the specific tranches. This would convert the debt into equity and would save us on interest payments and pay down the principal. The rate on this debt ranges from 6% to 10%.

It would also raise us an additional $2 million from the attached warrants. The interest savings would offset all or a large part of the dilution, and the bottom line is conversion would provide us with more cash to grow the Company faster.

Turning to slide 11, this slide gives you a picture of where we are moving toward with Rick's. The core concept remains the same: continuing to find new ways to develop and extract value from the adult-oriented restaurant/bar industry, taking particular advantage of the industry's potential for very high cash flow.

Of course, our core business is the adult gentlemen's clubs. We currently have 40 locations, and we believe there are 500 likely candidates for acquisition in the industry. Moreover, looking at ages of their owners, we believe many might be interested in selling over the next few years.

Leveraging our core expertise, we are developing our restaurant/sports bars business. We have been very successful at generating 50% of our revenue from high-margin liquor sales. This is about twice the restaurant industry standard. Restaurants/sports bars also complement the acquisition of adult clubs and are better understood by investors.

Third is the REIT, which would actually be a separate entity from Rick's. If successful, it could provide a vehicle for other club owners to sell their real estate. And if they do, that would enable us to develop closer relationships with them. Perhaps this could lead to our eventually acquiring them, as well.

Turning to slide 12 to reiterate our 2014 fiscal year guidance: to wrap up, we want to say, we continue to anticipate approximately $130 million in revenues. We did $29 million in the first quarter, but clearly, we anticipate sales will be ramping up based on our progress to date in the second quarter, new clubs coming online, and clubs less than a year old getting better, generating GAAP earnings of approximately $1.20 per share and producing non-GAAP earnings of $1.70 per share.

As I mentioned, we expect to see growth from existing clubs and restaurants and the new ones we expect to open in fiscal 2014. We also expect more upside from major sporting events, such as the college basketball championships in New York in March and the Final Four in Dallas in April.

I'd like to note that this guidance does not include acquisitions of any adult clubs, although such acquisitions are part of our longer 20% to 30% annual growth target. With that, let's open the line for questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) Howard Rosencrans, VA.

Congratulations on a nice quarter. Can you tell us -- you commented that October/November were 3% to 4% comps. If we were to put back in the $500,000 from the Texas weather, can you tell us what the comps would have been? Or maybe you want to exclude Texas for December? What were the comps outside of Texas? Any way you want to address that -- I'm just trying to get a sense of how December went.

Well, Texas was the most affected by the weather, but we actually had -- Minnesota had some downtime as well. Philadelphia and even New York was affected a couple of days from the weather. So it's really hard to really put it all back together to add the $500,000. I know the Texas clubs would have done much better, because we were really close for basically five days there.

And the New York -- obviously, the weather has not been too accommodating; it was not too accommodating in January, and February hasn't been a party, either, although I don't keep too attuned to exactly how the weather has been in Texas. How has the weather been -- how much has it impacted you in January and early February?

I still think impacts us some in the Dallas/Fort Worth market. The rest of Texas has been okay. We had a couple of days in Philadelphia, but basically we were still in the high teens for overall growth. And same-store sales growth was still over 4% for January. So very little effect. And, of course, the Super Bowl weather was fantastic, so that helped out everywhere.

Okay. And any timing on this REIT stuff? When do you think we might see something?

On the REIT stuff? We're working on it right now. We're working on getting the lawyers engaged; we're drawing up all the paperwork to form it all. We should get something out to the market very shortly on when that's going to be set up.

Okay. So we can hope for something this quarter? Is that realistic?

It's possible. It could be this quarter; it could be early next quarter. Probably for the next earnings conference call we'll definitely have an update.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions) Max Ellis, Private Investor.

Congratulations on a great quarter. I was wondering if you could maybe comment on the Los Angeles club? The last I heard it wasn't performing up to expectations, but I don't think I've heard anything since then.

Yes, we've had a little trouble out there. We're in the process of re-concepting that one, I think. We're going to change the demographic that we originally had gone after, and change to more of a -- in line with our Phoenix location. And we hope to get that all done here in the next couple of weeks.

Got it. Well, that's the only question I have. Look forward to hearing an update on the REIT once you have a chance. Thanks again.

(Operator Instructions) Ray Asmar, Summit Brokerage.

Eric, great quarter. My question to you is: you said there was about 500 prospective entity clubs that you were looking, at. What sort of criteria do you use to filter whether they pass your test as possible candidates for acquisition?

We wanted them to be in major markets that have sporting teams or convention business. We like at least 1 million people. We would look in other, smaller markets if they are around a base where we already have clubs. Those are the main factors that we look at.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Bob Brown, Private Investor.

Yes, two things. One is: any update on any stock buybacks in the past quarter, or what you're thinking of in terms of that -- particularly, also, in terms of even helping the stock price up in order to get to the -- be able to do some of the conversions?

And the second question is: I'm glad -- it's great to hear about the same-store sales in January. So does that mean that so far you're not seeing the new Vivid club cannibalize the existing New York club?

Okay, I'll start with stock buyback. We didn't purchase any stock in the last quarter in our stock buyback program. We've really focused on -- we typically had five properties, basically, under construction. That's where most of our free cash flow has gone into.

As far as the Vivid and the Rick's -- to give you an idea, the grand opening week of Rick's, we actually had a record week in January at Rick's. So Vivid has actually helped the deal. And I can let Ed -- Ed, are you on the call, still?

Yes, I am.

Ed, you want to explain to him the concepts and how some of that works?

Well, Rick's -- I like to think of Rick's as our classic gentlemen's club, while Vivid is clearly for the younger generation, meaning the concept is a little bit different. To go back in what Eric commented on as far as the numbers, on the soft opening day, or soft opening week, when we opened Vivid, we had a lot of traffic, a lot of regulars come in from Rick's. But, actually, Rick's had a record week that week. Not just during the big game Super Bowl week, but also during the soft opening, where we had a tremendous amount of traffic come into Vivid, but also Rick's had a huge amount of traffic. I believe that people are staying more towards the Midtown area instead of going to the Westside or the Eastside clubs.

All right. Thanks, Ed.

(Operator Instructions) Since there are no further questions at this time, I'd like to turn it back to Gary Fishman for any closing comments.

Thank you, Eric. I just wanted to remind everybody again that we do have a due diligence event at Rick's Cabaret a little later from 6:30 to 8:00 at 50 W. 33rd Street. If you haven't RSVPed, ask for me at the door.

Until then, we look forward to reporting our 2014 second-quarter sales in April and our second-quarter results in May. Thank you and have a great night.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.