Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING SEPTEMBER 2018 40 Australian made operate more efficiently with less manpower.” Wilson explains that TKHS has also been supporting some Australian-based suppliers with logistics going into Asia, Europe and the US where the various regulatory and importing requirements can vary vastly from location to location. “We help with the shipping of those items, customs clearance, even the placement and installation onto the casino floor,” he says. “I think that’s very attractive for an Australian supplier to have a partner that can support them from pick-up to installation.” “THE AUSTRALIAN MARKET IS A VERY INTERESTING ONE,” states TKHS Group Executive Director Samuel Wilson, pointing to a construction boom in the country’s gaming and hospitality industry across most major cities. It is with this in mind that TKHS has grown its Australian operations, noting the developments in Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast by Star Entertainment Group, SKYCITY’s Adelaide expansion and of course the highly-anticipated Crown Sydney project at Barangaroo. “There is a lot of Asian and Chinese investment in the market in general, not only for gaming but in general hospitality in all major cities across Australia – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and even Adelaide,” Wilson continues. “We’re offering the same services there to the market as we do elsewhere and what makes Australia particularly interesting from a logistics perspective is the costs involved for developers and operators – especially for manpower, those costs are extremely high. “That means we really need to be efficient in terms of our operations which is something we take great pride in through things like ISO certification and continuous improvement processes to Logistics is often an afterthought when it comes to developing hotels and resorts of the scale seen around Asia, yet a well-designed logistics operation can make or break a company’s grand development plans. FEATURES Crown Sydney is due for completion at its Barangaroo site in 2021 For its Macau customers, TKHS boasts a total of 9,000 square meters of storage space including its new Cotai facility and some older space near the airport covering 5,000 square meters. Across the border in Zhuhai is another 5,000 square meters used primarily for FF&E. As a logistics service provider focused specifically on the Asian gaming and hospitality industry, the company also boasts offices and warehouse facilities across the region’s key gaming hubs including the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Korea and Australia. It’s a broad scope with each location presenting its own unique set of challenges for local operators. “Infrastructure is a challenge we see across Asia,” Wilson explains. “We see a lot of developing countries wanting to get in on the game and open casinos and resorts. The challenge is the infrastructure in those countries in terms of the port facilities, the airports, roads. “In Cebu you can barely get a container truck down the roads so it’s about finding ways around those challenges. It might be hiring a barge to get to a site to avoid the roads. “We had to charter an aircraft for one of our projects which is very expensive but due to the timeline it was needed. It was a large cargo plane and we got it in but the airport didn’t actually have the proper equipment to unload the aircraft. “They’d never experienced a charter of that scale but they had some old equipment in the corner and luckily the plane came with its own engineer, so he came off and fixed the equipment and we were able to use that to unload the cargo. “I was actually on the runway myself coordinating the operation with the pilot of the plane at 1am to get it done.”