Here’s the end-of-year list you’ve all been waiting for. Inside Asian Gaming is pleased to present our collection of the best quotes uttered over the past year.
As we only started gathering quotes in the second half of 2008, it’s not really an annual award at all, more a light-hearted recognition of the role of public pronouncements and the media in the modern gaming business.
Most of the quotes from 2008 were intentionally amusing or provocative when they left the minds and mouths of the industry leaders concerned. One or two are unintentionally funny. We’ll leave you, the reader, to decide into what category each quote should fall.
Roughly speaking, there was a correlation between the actual market share of the casino operators in Macau and the number of times a representative of one of those companies appeared in our quotes section. Has IAG discovered something profound about human behaviour, i.e., that the more savvy a boss is in speaking to the media and summing up his or her company’s vision, the better the chances of success for his or her enterprise?
In the northeast of England, there’s certainly a saying that “The shy bairns get nowt”. This roughly translates as ‘If you hang back in life, you don’t succeed’.
When it comes to Macau’s gaming resorts, size increasingly matters, so we decided to give the IAG Quote of the Week 2008 award not to an individual utterance but to the person whose words of wisdom got the most weekly mentions.
One candidate put on a late surge with a real corker. The coup de grace for the other contenders was the fact he was also the subject of two of the quotes uttered by other people.
He is none other than SJM’s Dr Stanley Ho. Very warm congratulations from the whole team at IAG.
| Ranking | Name | Company | Appearances |
| 1 | Stanley Ho | SJM | 3 |
| 2 | Sheldon Adelson | Las Vegas Sands Corp. | 2 |
| 2 | Frank McFadden | SJM | 2 |
| 4 | Thomas A. Anderson | Seeking Alpha | 1 |
| 4 | Anonymous | Asian Poker Tour | 1 |
| 4 | Ian Coughlan | Wynn Resorts | 1 |
| 4 | Edmund Ho | Macau Chief Executive | 1 |
| 4 | Lawrence Ho | Melco Crown Entertainment | 1 |
| 4 | Guy Laliberte | Cirque du Soleil | 1 |
| 4 | Lai See | South China Morning Post | 1 |
| 4 | William Weidner | LVS | 1 |
| 4 | Steve Wynn | Wynn Resorts | 1 |
| 4 | Thomas Wu | Hopewell Holdings | 1 |
Continue reading: IAG Quotes of the Week 2008
