Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | February 2010 4 Editorial Inside Asian Gaming is published by Must Read Publications Ltd Suite 1907, AIA Tower, 215A-301 Av. Comercial de Macau - Macau Tel: (853) 6646 0795 For subscription enquiries, please email subs@asgam.com For advertising enquiries, please email ads@asgam.com or call: (853) 6646 0795 www.asgam.com Inside Asian Gaming is an official media partner of: http://www.gamingstandards.com Michael Grimes We crave your feedback. Please email your comments tomichael@asgam.com Publisher Kareem Jalal Director João Costeira Varela Editor Michael Grimes Business Development Manager Domingos Abecasis Contributors Desmond Lam, Steve Karoul I. Nelson Rose, Richard Marcus Shenée Tuck, James J. Hodl Andrew MacDonald William R. Eadington Graphic Designer Brenda Chao Photography Ike One in the Eye for the Tiger As it’s the Year of the Tiger this month, the attention of the editorial team at Inside Asian Gaming has naturally been drawn to the portrayal in popular culture of this beautiful and endangered animal. There are tigers on packets of breakfast cereal, tigers on beer bottles, tigers on tubes of skin balm and even (on occasion) a Tiger on a golf course. There’s also a less gainly animal called a‘Liger’. This is a cross between a lion and a tiger—a miscegenation that would never occur in nature but for the advent of modern air travel and modern science. This is a real animal and not a practical joke. It has the bulk of a tiger, and the boldness of the lion but the majesty of neither, looking less like the big cat equivalent of a lean and hungry Rocky Balboa and more like a real life Sylvester Stallone since he stopped working out so much. We mention this strange animal because it reminds us that when one mixes different elements together in an industry such as casino gaming, the end result isn’t always what one might expect. A good example is that building a casino’s appeal to mass players in a market such as Macau could—in the short term at least—lead to an underperformance or even fall in revenue if the casino’s offer isn’t supported by a healthy slice of VIP business. That’s a lesson that has been learned by Ponte 16, the casino resort located next to Macau’s historic Inner Harbour. It looks as though Ponte 16’s solution is to try and build some mass-market margin through volume by turning part of the property into what our Victorian ancestors might have referred to as a ‘museum sideshow.’ In Ponte 16’s case, that’s various items from the late singer Michael Jackson’s sock and props drawer gathered together and put in a gallery to boost visitor numbers. Big Cat Diary While we’re on the subject of big cats, it’s worth reminding ourselves of recent events in the ‘Lion City,’ i.e. Singapore. By the time Inside Asian Gaming goes to press, Genting’s US$4.4 billion Resorts World Sentosa property may have been granted its precious casino licence, thereby automatically disqualifying it from contention as the year’s most expensively assembled collection of hotels. Will Singapore’s gaming industry turn out to be a best of breed, taking Singapore’s talent for regulation and matching it with foreign operators’ talent for producing attractive gaming resorts? Or will it turn out to be the ungainly gaming industry equivalent of a ‘Liger’, with the stiffness of over regulation matched by operators’ natural tendency to over hype? Let’s hope, for everybody’s sake, it’s the former. The ungainly ‘Liger’