Dear IAG Japan readers,
It’s been our honor, privilege and pleasure to bring you IAG Japan over the past three years.
We’ve been very grateful for the support we have received from our Japanese readers. It’s been exciting to cover the integrated resort (IR) industry in the Japanese language and to be at the forefront of covering developments in the IR industry in Japan.
Inside Asian Gaming (IAG) has been publishing in English in Macau since 2005, and when excitement started around an IR industry in Japan in 2016, 2017 and 2018, we wanted to get involved – after all IAG is the premier B2B IR industry trade media brand in Asia, so it was only natural for us to want to add an IAG Japan brand!
When we finally launched IAG Japan in January 2019, after many months of planning, it wasn’t just about adding the Japanese language. We also built a local Japanese team on the ground in Japan, and I personally travelled to Japan every month in 2018, during the planning phase, and every month in 2019, our first year of operations in Japan.
Sadly, my last trip to Japan was to Yokohama and Tokyo in late January 2020. The global pandemic hit just days after that trip, while I was in London, and I still haven’t been able to return. I miss Japan terribly and can’t wait to travel to Japan again when it eventually becomes possible.
However, beyond the pandemic, we have also been saddened by the progress of the IR industry in Japan over the past two years or so. The pandemic certainly hasn’t helped, but this isn’t really about the pandemic. The problem runs deeper than that.
As most of you know, almost all the world’s major IR companies have, one by one, withdrawn their interest in developing an IR in Japan. Caesars, Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, Suncity, Melco Resorts, Mohegan Sun – the list goes on and on. Just a few days ago Genting Singapore began liquidating all its Japan subsidiaries. Galaxy Entertainment Group is reducing its Japanese team from a peak of over 25 people to just one person.
In a December 2021 interview with IAG, Mohegan International President Bobby Soper said of Japan, “It definitely evolved much differently than many thought it would. The regulatory requirements, the short term of the license – there are a lot of reasons it didn’t make sense for a lot of companies.”
Perhaps the late, great, Chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands, Mr Sheldon Adelson, summed it up best, simply stating, “The framework around the development of an IR has made our goals in Japan unreachable.”
As well as many companies withdrawing from the process, we’ve also seen many locations in Japan pass on the opportunity to host an IR. Originally over a dozen locations were in the mix, but now we have just three: Osaka, Wakayama and Nagasaki. To be frank, I see issues with all three, but in particular the two regional locations have massive challenges ahead of them.
Many commentators are suggesting that perhaps the only IR that will eventually see the light of day will be MGM at Osaka, and even that is by no means a foregone conclusion. If it does open, I expect it will be sometime in the 2030s. We wish our friends at MGM Resorts and in Osaka all the best and fervently hope Osaka does eventually get its long sought-after MGM integrated resort on Yumeshima Island – and that it is a great success.
Given the diminishment of international interest in Japanese IRs, and the reduction in IR development activity in Japan, we have decided to scale back IAG Japan significantly. The final issue of IAG Japan monthly magazine will be the January 2022 issue, which will be published in the upcoming days. As for our website www.asgam.jp, from now on we will scale right back to around one story per week, focussing on just the most important stories relating to the Japanese IR industry.
This means that our electronic direct mail product IAG Japan Daily Briefing will no longer be an every-weekday product with around five stories per day but will instead only issue when we publish stories on www.asgam.jp – around once a week with just one story per issue.
We are planning this scaled back level of publishing for at least the first six months of 2022. There is simply not enough international (or even domestic) interest in IRs in Japan anymore. Additionally, there are many exciting developments occurring in other parts of Asia, and like all businesses IAG needs to allocate its resources to those areas in which its customers – in our case IR industry participants and our other readers – are most interested.
Naturally, the main IAG brand will continue to cover Japan at www.asgam.com, as it always has, but this will be in English. And our Japanese website www.asgam.jp will still house the approximately 4,000 articles we have written in Japanese over the past three years.
The cover story of the January 2022 issue, written by me, is entitled “The Japan IR Industry: A Golden Opportunity Squandered.” It is a 3,400-word deep dive into the Japan IR industry, and where we think it all went so wrong. I urge you to read it if you get the chance.
On another matter, should any Japanese company want to hire IAG Japan to write a white paper for them, or do some consulting, or offer advisory services, or help them to get connected to potential customers in the IR industry, we would be absolutely delighted to do so. I personally have 35 years of global industry experience, and our team has Japanese language capability. We would love to offer our services to promote the healthy and sustainable development of the Japan IR industry, if our services are wanted.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the members of the IAG Japan team for their hard work over the past three years, particularly Aki Isoi, Reina Nishimura, Shintaro Kamimura, Jenn Yamazaki, Gemma Sakamoto, Yuki Mitaka, Jin Kobayashi and Miho Kunita.
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We will review this decision at the end of the first half of 2022, and IAG Japan may return to its previous level of publishing if justified by the level of international interest at that time.
Until then, I wish the very best for the IR industry in Japan and hope it can get back on track. We have made many friends in Japan, and I wish all of them and anyone reading these words the very best for the future.
Yours very sincerely,
Andrew W Scott
CEO
Inside Asian Gaming (IAG)
IAG Japan
1 January 2022
