The US Playing Card Company is going after upmarket casinos as customers in Asia
Increasing product sales in any market that’s dominated by one or two suppliers is always a challenge. One possible strategy for success is to focus sales effort on a select number of new, high-end customers looking for premium products and a very personalised client-customer relationship, and then build your market reputation from there. Another is to build on your existing client relationships in other markets. If those companies then open operations in your target market you are well-positioned to pitch for their business.
Those are elements in the multi-track approach being taken in Asia by the United States Playing Card Company (USPC), one of the world’s leading suppliers of preshuffled casino-standard playing cards and card shoes. At G2E Asia, Inside Asian Gaming caught up with Michael W. Slaughter, recently appointed as USPC’s President of Global Casino, to find out more about the company’s view on Asia and the opportunities available as the number of casino venues increases in the region.
IAG: What are your key target markets in Asia?
Michael Slaughter: Obviously Macau. It’s significant to just about everybody in the gaming business at this point. All of the new venues such as the Philippines and Singapore are also very important. It takes a significant amount of increased resources to capitalise on those opportunities.
How do you build share in a market such as Macau that is dominated by a rival supplier?
What we ask is ‘What keeps a CEO up at night?’ That applies to any business, whether it be the hotel business, the gaming business or virtually any industry in the world. It’s the question of the problem with the supply chain. We’re big proponents of secondary supply. While it’s always wonderful to have 100% of anyone’s business, there’s nothing more important than secondary supply for virtually every industry in the world. We do it throughout our businesses. We make sure that we have secondary suppliers for inks, for adhesives, for transportation and so on. That’s just a good business measure, no matter what business you’re in.
We’re very fortunate as a company that we manufacture on two distant continents. We have a sister company in Spain called Fournier. In terms of something like disaster recovery, we have the potential to move our production there should we ever need that. We are fortunate to be based in a part of the United States—Kentucky—that has a very low susceptibility to many of the common ails of Mother Nature. But in any case we’ve got what we think is a ‘Never say never’ bulletproof plan.
What do you feel are USPC’s other strengths?
We have a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant. We’re also fortunate to have a large parent company—the Jarden Corporation, a US$6 billion supplier of a multitude of consumer goods, proprietary business products and services. That means you get great support to invest in your business. So we recently invested US$30 million in the new plant in Kentucky and we put in allnew equipment. We’ve been able to finetune that plant to optimise production and maximise our capabilities.
There are opportunities coming up all the time with new casino openings in Asia. For example, MGM Grand Ho Tram is due to open in the first quarter of 2013. How do you get your brand positioned and visible for opportunities in emerging Asian markets?
We happen to be in the premium segment of the market with our brands such as Bee® and Aristocrat® [cards]. We feel we want to be in the right properties. We don’t want to reduce our brand equity by taking and cheapening our product in any way. So we’ve made the conscious choice to compete in the high end of the business but still provide great value to our clients. That’s because our clients understand the need for quality and customer service as well as great pricing. So we think that with all of the new venues opening, we’ll be able to compete anywhere in the world—whether it be Macau, Singapore, the Philippines, Cambodia or Vietnam. We appreciate competition. Competition keeps the market healthy and keeps us working harder to stay in front.
What’s happening in terms of the marketing of your “Bee”® Baccarat dealing shoe and the modular marketing of the shoe and your proprietary cards?
We continue to reinvent the technology behind our shoe so that we can stay one step ahead of the cheat. Really, it’s all about game protection and security for the operator. So what we do is focus on that and make sure we have proprietary shoes and proprietary cards so that it eliminates the opportunity for cheating in the game.
We have the good fortune that such is the quality of the Bee shoe it’s almost maintenance-free. In terms of maintenance, it’s really a question of keeping the shoe clean and it should then operate for years very efficiently and without any trouble. But we also have a team here in Macau that is able to service our shoes locally and that can travel to the rest of Asia. We also have resources in a number of other countries in the region—either working direct with our company or as agents that then take care of our product—such as in Australia, Cambodia, the Philippines and [South] Korea. A sizeable part of our business is in Korea.
During G2E Asia there was a seminar on casino security given by Sal Piacente, a well-known consultant on game protection. What’s his opinion of USPC products?
Sal Piacente is a friend of USPC. He’s been through our plant and he’s seen the security behind the way we produce our products and is comfortable with that. It’s fortunate to have someone who is in the security business as a non-paid advocate of our approach to the business. He is one of the key minds in the industry on the topic of game protection. He understands clearly that the pre-shuffle— and the GLIcertified random pre-shuffle that we use in particular—is the best methodology in the industry. Mathematically, it beats the cheat every time if you perform appropriately using the pre-shuffle.
What’s your impression of G2E Asia?
I think G2E Asia is going to become the pre-eminent event for gaming globally—especially with the massive amount of gaming growth that’s taking place in Asia right now. It gives us an opportunity to get in front of and participate with our key customers and share with them things that are coming forward in terms of new technologies in our playing cards. We’re very excited about that.
