Royal Caribbean Cruises Q3 2009 Earnings Call Transcript

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2009-11-03 12:20:31.0

Tags: Wells Fargo & Co., Vessel, Call Transcript, Earnings, Corporate Governance, Pricing, Business Operations, Corporate Law, Marketing, Seeking Alpha

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Tim Conder with Wells Fargo.

Timothy Conder – Wells Fargo

Thank you. Brian, just from a clarity standpoint, again on the first quarter and 2010 net yields, do you expect them to be positive in absolute terms or just up year over year? To clarify that -- secondly, if you -- based on one of the slides that you showed there, and just another clarification point, can you give us some more color on the -- let’s call it legacy core fleet and how the cannibalization is tracking there versus your expectations? And then obviously separating that from the Oasis and the Solstice class ships.

Brian J. Rice

Sure, Tim. For the first quarter and the full year, we are expecting both will have higher yields in the corresponding period in ’09.

Timothy Conder – Wells Fargo

Positive in absolute terms, you are saying?

Brian J. Rice

Yes.

Timothy Conder – Wells Fargo

Okay.

Brian J. Rice

And that would include ticket, on board, and core revenue as well.

Timothy Conder – Wells Fargo

Okay.

Brian J. Rice

And as we looked at the slide for first quarter, we tried to give a little bit of clarity into what you called our legacy vessels. I think one of the points that I was trying to make is cannibalization is less what I would use to define if there is an impact on the legacy ships. I think it is more going into development markets that we believe is very important for our future and oftentimes those markets will take a year or two to really see for us. But similar to the investments that we were making in some of the major European markets a few years ago, those markets are really paying off for us. We are expanding into some of the markets that Adam mentioned that we believe it’s a little too early to get a read on.

I want to emphasize that the charts that we showed was really benchmarking our current pricing environment relative to ’08 and if you recall in ’09, we had a 13.5% yield deterioration in the first quarter of ’09. That’s a tough benchmark. But the legacy vessels as you’ve called them seem to be holding their own at this point and I think the two things that I would call out why we are anticipating yield accretion is the performance of the newer vessels, which we do have the benefit of those vessels and they will be included in our results and they are performing exceptionally well, as well as the fact that we don’t expect that sort of rapid acceleration at discounting that we incurred last year when we were all -- all businesses were kind of shocked by the effects of the economy.

 

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