Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Norwegian Cruise lunch stares are struggling today, but that is despite record bookings in the first quarter. Investor expectations are sky high following that strong report. We're going to bring in Norwegian Cruise Line CEO Harry Summer to talk about what's going on in
his business. Harry, you know, if you look at what you've given the street, you've hiped your guidance here and you're still not seeing investors react to the extent that you would think if you were saying things are going to be better in the future. How do you meet investor expectations at this point?
You know? Well, first off, thank you for having me on this show today. We are really thrilled with our performance in Q one. We saw a revenue of twenty percent, yields up sixteen percent, great demand both in ticket revenue and onboard revenue, and we doubled our IVIDA from last year. So these are all great indicators of the performance that the company did in Q one. I think anything that happened with the stock today perhaps just a small time reaction,
but we are super focused on the long term. We raised our EPs guidance for the year. We raised our yield guidance for the year. We are super happy with the Cruise Guest and the cruz Guest and.
NCLH speak through now what the competition looks like at this point for cruise goers When you look at your customer base, are you finding that more people are coming in that are new either to the cruise industry or new to Norwegian? What do the numbers say?
Sure, we so to answer the first your question. First, our competitive set is really hotel chains. You know, if you think about the North American market for vacations, cruises makes up barely two percent of it. So I know you had the quote from my friend Jason on the top of the show, He's not really our competitor, our competitor or the Hilton, Marriott's, Piot's ihds of the world,
because that's really where the guest has choice. And we believe that cruising represents both in edible value compared to hotels and also a much better guest experience. Our ships are always well maintained, they give a consistent product. We go to fantastic places around the world, both close to home and far away, and we really see guests continuing to favor cruising as vacation, so new to cruises up a few points, new To and cl is up a
few points. We're definitely seeing record interest in a cruise location.
It's interesting because it's not just this idea of Royal Caribbean and you guys versus the hotel chains as you've been saying. Actually today is an interesting day. There's another cruise operator going public as well in one of the biggest IPOs of the year. How do you see more entrance into this space, particularly when it comes to dollars from public investors.
You know, I think VIK has done a great job over there at their last few decades, and both the river cruise space and the ocean cruise space, and I think anything that elevates the cruise experience is good for the industry. I think at the end of the day, the cruising industry is healthiest what it has good participants with great product and great guests experiences on board. Certainly
biking delivers that. Of course NCLH does as well, and we very much look forward to these new entrants continuing to build demand for the industry in public from a financial investment community, I think any good financial performer in the industry raises the perception, if you will, of cruising in the financial markets. So we're thrilled from that perspective as well.
It's interesting because when we look at your numbers versus the estimates compiled by Bloomberg, a lot of beats there or as we've been talking about Harry passengers carried, and even on operating capacity as well, But the revenue is where things felt slightly short of expectations. What do you think was the biggest contributor there?
You know, really I emphasize what you said. We beat on pretty much every key metric you know, net revenue, margins, ibita aps across the board, so we were very pleased with our performance. We beat both guidance and consensus.
YEA.
Revenue really talks to some of the items that we make a small margin on, like air and I talked about that in the coll this morning, that we sold guests slightly fewer air tickets. Now, air tickets isn't a high margin item for us, so actually selling slightly few of them is better overall for the company. So it impacted gross revenue, but it didn't impact net revenue. Our net revenue exceeded guidance and exceeded consensus.
How sensitive is the consumer that you have to the environment that we're living in, Harry, Even if you're kind of excited about this kind of record bookings environment, do you worry about consumer sentiment at this point is very fragile.
You know, we're not seeing any cracks and consumer sentiment in our core demographics. You know, we really sell cruises between our three brands and our Reegian Cruise Line, Oceanic Cruises and Region seven seat cruises across all demographic fronts, but mostly to higher net worth individuals, and sentiment within the higher net worth individuals it continues to be really high.
Couple that with the huge gap invocation experience between us and the alternative ications, plus a value gap that creases our price less than hotels in spite having a better experience, and we're really seeing demand continue to outperform our expectations despite any cracks that we see in other parts of the economy.
Harry, we thank you so very much for joining us on a very busy earnings period for you. That is Norwegian Cruise Line CEO, Harry Summer. Now it's another stock moving Amazon it's cloud unit posted its strongest sales growth in a year, a sign that the retailer's most profitable unit is recovering from a slump in certain businesses. We're going to break it down with John Arlcmann from BNN
Bloomberg joining us from Toronto and Encyclopedic. As we know as ever about technology, John, you also spoke earlier, I believe, to an Amazon executive as well. What are they saying about their potential and the exciting stuff in cloud in AI?
Yeah, so much to talk about, Shanali and I guess we'll start with the market reaction to these latest Amazon numbers. You could make the argument if we hadn't seen the success we saw from AWS, maybe there'd be a slightly different narrative just because of the guidance from the second
quarter overall. But if you think about where we were a year ago, just as contact Sanale, when a lot of business customers were starting to be a little bit uncertain about the economic spending environment, there were questions about what that would mean for Amazon Web services, and yet here we are with AI and full effect right now,
and that being reflected in these quarterly results. The numbers that really stood out to me Shonali, the fact that on the revenue side, AWS clearing twenty five billion dollars, so an annual run right now of one hundred billion dollars for this business. You're going to be hard pressed to find any corporate software business outside of Microsoft to that size and scale. And that's just one part of
the Amazon business. And then the profit story, the fact that the operating margins are already north of thirty eight percent Bloomberg Intelligence seeing that heading towards forty percent, but during an earning season where companies in technology are continuing to SPA and on AI. Maybe one of the lessons from the Meta conference call when Mark Zuckerberg obviously committed to some big numbers and that raised concerns on Wall Street.
By comparison Andy Jasse talking about the need to spend but also the need to monetize quickly on that spending. That seemed to resonate with the streets. So Amazon getting a lot of check marks, it feels like from the Wall Street community so far.
Johnny, thank you so much for your time. We had to leave it there for now,