“Uneven performance” and difficult year-over-year comparisons were cited by J.P. Morgan analyst Joseph Greff, as he trimmed cash-flow projections for MGM Resorts International. Greff’s cutback, outlined in an October 15 investor note, reflects anticipated MGM earnings from the third quarter of this year through all of 2025.
Although Greff maintained an Overweight rating on the stock, he shaved $6 off his price target, reducing it to $51 per share. MGM was trading at $40.24 a share at the time of his report.
Among the reasons cited by Greff for his caution were the absence of the Super Bowl and certain conventions from the first quarter of 2025. He also believed MGM would yield market share in Macau, where it has been getting its best business to date since the lifting of COVID restrictions.
Greff’s new third-quarter cash-flow projections were $754 million from the Las Vegas Strip, $298 million from regional casinos, and $231 million from Macau. For fourth quarter 2024, he anticipated $749 million in Strip cash flow, $275 million from provincial casinos, and an additional $248 million in Macanese cash flow.
While Greff’s non-Macau numbers for the third quarter were considerably more optimistic than Wall Street’s consensus, it was quite a different fourth-quarter story. There, Wall Street expected $792 million out of the Strip, $265 million regionally, and $274 million from Macau.
For all of 2025, Greff cut his projections by five percent for the Strip (to $2.9 billion of cash flow) and 13 percent for the Chinese enclave to $1 billion. However, he boosted his U.S. regional projection by three percent to $1.1 billion.
“Another way one can interpret our estimate reductions is that it could serve as a de-risking exercise and the shares can potentially grind higher,” penned Greff. “Our sense is that this is one name in our coverage universe for which buy-side sentiment is particularly negative, stemming from management’s callout of soft initial booking trends related to F1 back in late July.”
Another drag on MGM’s price target was softness in Las Vegas hotel room rates, despite the removal of the Mirage and Tropicana from the market. Greff allowed that MGM’s new-project pipeline (including MGM Osaka, which just began construction this week) was not valued into the stock price at all.
