“Extreme” pessimism in Las Vegas; The D pisses for safety

Writing off the 2Q20 results as “less than relevant,” JP Morgan analyst Joseph Greff was guardedly optimistic about Las Vegas Sands, even though management’s conference call “shed little light on the path of recovery in Macau SAR, Singapore or Las Vegas,” the latter being described as “impaired in the near term.” (We’ll say!) Greff’s outlook was buoyed by the lifting of quarantines in China that “will allow for improving [gross gaming revenue] trends in Macau, a gaming-/travel-dependent market that experienced the COVID-19 downturn first and should experience a bounce/recovery earlier, at least in relation to potential recoveries on the Las Vegas Strip and in U.S. business travel lodging markets.” Singapore will be a relative laggard “given airlift dependency and sourcing players from multiple geographies that are also reeling from various travel restrictions.” As for Sin City, “Las Vegas was described in extremely pessimistic terms given that market’s airlift capacity and group/convention dependence, the latter of which was described as a zero for the rest of 2020 and a big segment of its (normalized) profit.” (emphasis added)