Mr. Murren: Our company's roots date back to the days when Mr. Kerkorian built many of the MGMs that are now called something else. And he built the biggest and best of many casinos in the 1970s and 1980s. But our company really, I think, more appropriately dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the MGM Grand Las Vegas was under development and then opened in 1993. The company is the product of significant internal growth and two large acquisitions - one in 2000, when MGM Grand acquired Mirage Resorts and renamed the company MGM Mirage, and then four years later when MGM Mirage acquired Mandalay Resort Group. Our history is rich with acquisitions and with internal growth. We've built this company into one of the largest, certainly I think the most respected, gaming companies in our industry.
TWST: Would you give us an overview of what you've been able to accomplish in
recent months and what you hope to accomplish in the future?
Mr. Murren: Absolutely. It's been an extraordinarily difficult time in the
hospitality industry over the past year and a half, and more so late last year
and early 2009. MGM Mirage, like many capital-intensive businesses in
hospitality, was hit on many fronts. We dealt with the recession, which has had
a profound impact on revenue and profitability as a result of lower
discretionary spending by consumers and lower business travel. In addition,
there was the credit crisis that led to a financial freeze that paralyzed
corporate America through most of last year and the early part of this year. On
top of all that, we were and still are today, building the largest, privately
funded project in the United States. So we had a triple threat of issues to deal
with. And how we've been dealing with these issues, I think, will be written
about for many years to come because we were able to successfully navigate
through the credit crisis by refinancing and fully financing CityCenter, the
project that's under development. We've been able to cut costs dramatically and
are now starting to build revenue to maximize the cash flow in this recession
that we are in. And we've been able to do all that while negotiating with our
bank group and with our bondholders to buy us time by extending maturities and
building up our current reserves of cash. It has been very difficult. It would
be simplistic to say that we're out of the woods and the sun is going to shine
now forever. But we've largely solved our problems, certainly all our immediate
ones, and now we are positioned to benefit from the recovery that seems to be
gradually underway.
Tickers included in this excerpt: MGM
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