If things don’t work out for Melco Crown Entertainment (Nasdaq: MPEL) at City of Dreams on Cotai it won’t be for lack of effort.
The public relations folks at MPEL have been going into overdrive since the opening of their integrated resort on 1st June.
To get a flavour of the PR approach, here’s a headline from one press release: “Grand Opening of City of Dreams Takes-Off Like a Dream.”
Geddit?
Like new parents who can’t resist telling their friends about every tiny milestone in the life of their toddler–such as each time little Johnny smiles or burps up his lunch–every micro marketing event at CoD has been given the same lavish, loving treatment.
“The Spa at Crown Summer Promotion,” shouts one headline in a release sent recently to the woodland folk here at Asian Gaming Intelligence.
“The Spa at Crown offers you the perfect urban escape to relax, pamper and detoxify,” it continues. We had to look up ‘detoxify’ in an online dictionary to make sure it was a real word.
Still the releases kept coming: “Family Swimming Fun & Poolside Barbeque Buffet”; “Rock Spa Summer Promotion”; “Horizons Sunday Brunch”. We look forward to receiving an invitation to the ‘Hard Rock Bun Feast’, any day now.
Behind all this frantic activity is though a more important issue, which is that MPEL simply has to make a success of CoD if it is to realise its ambitions in the Macau gaming market.
On Thursday the company issued a statement saying CoD had received 1.2 million visitors since its opening day–equivalent to 41,000 visitors per day on average.
Some of them are certainly spending money according to MPEL’s statement filed with the US Securities & Exchange Commission.
“Rolling chip performance at City of Dreams demonstrated significant week to week sequential improvement during the initial month of operations, in accordance with our plans to scale this segment of business after the first few weeks of operation,” said MPEL.
“Total rolling chip volume in June was approximately USD1.94 billion, with rolling chip volume in the last week of the month totalling approximately USD0.73 billion. The average number of rolling chip gaming tables in operation at City of Dreams in June was approximately 127,” added the operator.
MPEL said CoD generated approximately USD100 million of mass-market table games drop in June.
“Mass market table games drop in the last week of the month was approximately 12% higher than that generated in the first week of operations. On average, 376 mass market gaming tables were in operation at City of Dreams in June,” added the company.
“Gaming machine handle (volume) was approximately USD81 million in June. There were approximately 1,320 gaming machines in operation at City of Dreams, on average, during this period,” stated MPEL
“City of Dreams’ mass market table games hold percentage was within the targeted range of 16 percent-18 percent in June, but the rolling chip hold percentage was approximately 0.8 percent, well below our target of 2.85%.
“Total rolling chip volume in June at Altira Macau was USD2.76 billion. The rolling chip hold percentage at Altira in June was significantly below normal at approximately 2.0%.
“Normalizing our gaming revenue to reflect the target rolling chip hold percentage at both properties, we estimate that our company-wide market share of gross gaming revenues for June would have been approximately 15 percent,” concluded the statement.
