Inside Asian Gaming

September 2011 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 35 19 (18) Tom Hall Business Development Director Sunplus tax and a mandatory 3% to 4% tax for social and welfare contributions). Win per table at US$11,185 at MBS was second only to The Venetian Macao, with roughly the same number of tables. Slot win at US$611 per unit was nearly three times greater than The Venetian Macao and second only to the Plaza Casino in LVS’s The Four Seasons Macao, which has about the same number of machines. The operating margin—calculated on earnings before tax—came in at a whopping 55%. Through the first half of 2011, Marina Bay Sands’ 52% EBITDA margin was the highest in the company (the Macau properties ran at a combined 33%, the company as a whole recorded 37 %). During that time, MBS generated 29 US cents of every US dollar Las Vegas Sands netted and 41 US cents of every US dollar of EBITDA. Tellingly, MBS’s contribution to the LVS bottom line comes without the benefit of VIP junket operations, which generate something like 75% of gaming revenues in Macau. LVS says it will continue to run MBS without them. Of course, this could change when its rival on Sentosa Island gets its first junket partners through the Lion City’s stringent licensing review; assuming they do get through. That may well be when Mr MacDonald faces his greatest test to date. Sceptics might argue that Singapore’s casinos can’t miss, no matter what management team is sent out onto the field. But no one disputes the value of Mr MacDonald’s experience. He came up through the Australian industry, starting as a dealer in Tasmania, moving up the ranks into upper management in Adelaide and at Hilton’s Conrad Jupiters in Queensland and with the Packer organization, and he knows the regulatory side, having served in the Casino Control Divisions of Queensland and New South Wales. Before joining Macquarie he was executive vice president-Gaming at Malaysia-based Genting, parent company of Resorts World Sentosa. So far at Marina Bay he has proven expert at managing risk and credit at the premium- play level while delivering a product that also hits it big with the mass market, outshining RWS in the last reporting period in terms of operating efficiency and snatching a 56% market share. Given the revolving door of casino senior management, that’s a talent worth holding on to. Tom Hall heads global business development for Sunplus. The company is a software developer with deep roots in Asia’s highly sophisticated and competitive sports bettingmarkets. It nowhas ambitions to take its leading-edge technologies worldwide. Mr Hall is recognised as one of the world’s experts on interactive and online gambling. He came to Sunplus earlier this year from AsianLogic, which he co-founded and helped build into one of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest providers of Web gambling and betting services. He still serves as AsianLogic’s vice chairman. Previously, he served as Group CEO for Playtech, the world’s leading provider of ready-to-use technology for online casinos including software, hosting, customer service and transaction management. At Playtech, Mr Hall was responsible for overseeingcustomer growth and the development of customised software for Asian markets. No one is more familiar from an operations standpoint with the preferences of the region’s sports bettors. He understands the need for bookmaking and book management skills that can cope with high betting volumes, large individual bets and, in particular, Asian gamblers’favourite—‘in-play,’(also known as ‘in-running’) betting. Such play—gambling on propositions derived from any number of possible outcomes during the live action of a game—may constitute 80% by volume of Internet betting in Asia, according to some industry estimates. Currently, in-play betting is not so widespread in the rest of the world. In the large and lucrative jurisdictions where online betting is legal in Europe, it accounts only for an estimated 30% of bets. The reason seems to be that European companies are not keen to take on the high risk and small margins typically considered acceptable by Asian bookmakers. Mr Hall is determined to change that outlook, for the benefit of gamblers and bookmakers alike. In-play betting shares many of the complexities of financial market trading. Indeed, that’s where the technology to manage in-play betting was pioneered. It’s not too fanciful to say that it’s Web gambling’s version of rocket science. Sunplus’ products and their back of house support have the ability to receive and instantaneously process, price and pay off on tens of thousands of decisions on the fly in response to second-by-second shifts in fortune across thousands of events at the same time. Taiwan-based Sunplus has spent the better part of the last decade under various trading entities refining a sophisticated and robust software platform which Mr Hall believes will translate the high octane, relatively high-risk Asian Internet gambling business model into something providers everywhere can offer affordably and profitably. The smaller books are an especially ripe market, as he sees it, as are portals that would like to add sports betting to theirmenu. Many onlinegamingproviders fall into the latter category. ONEBook, the latest iteration of the Sunplus platform, is handling in a typical month more than 18,000 live markets across more than 5,000 in-running soccer games and an additional 1,800 in-running events and 3,000 markets in 29 other sports. It posts and pays odds in five different formats (US-style odds are on the way). It speaks eight languages (with German, Italian and Romanian being added to support Mr Hall’s march into continental Europe). There are significant upfront costs in establishing a sophisticated bet management system. But once it’s running and handling large volumes of transactions—up to 150,000 bettors simultaneously have been handled in Asia at peak times—economies of scale come into effect. That means the cost per transaction is significantly reduced as compared to traditional Western bookmaking, where the operator manages the customer rather than managing the price. Mansion88, Fun88, IBCBet, Bodog88 and AsianLogic are already using ONEBook, and its popularity is expected to surge as the ‘global village’ for live events continues to expand and the consumption of mobile technologies increases. Mr Hall is looking forward to taking Sunplus ‘on the road’ in 2011-12 and beyond.