Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2011 4 Editorial Inside Asian Gaming is published by Must Read Publications Ltd 8J Ed. Comercial Si Toi 619 Avenida da Praia Grande Macau Tel: (853) 2832 9980 For subscription enquiries, please email subs@asgam.com For advertising enquiries, please email ads@asgam.com or call: (853) 6680 9419 www.asgam.com Inside Asian Gaming is an official media partner of: http://www.gamingstandards.com Publisher Kareem Jalal Director João Costeira Varela Editor Michael Grimes 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 Australia…Down Under but definitely not out “Australia is so cool that it’s hard to even knowwhere to start describing it. The beaches are beautiful; so is the weather. Not too crowded. Great food, great music, really nice people. It must be a lot like Los Angeles was many years ago,” said American actress Mary-Kate Olsen when asked about a visit there. So there you have it from a Hollywood insider. Australia is like California when California was still fun. Add the novelty of some exotic wildlife and Australia is bound to be a winner with Asian tourists— including Asian high roller gamblers. And for high net worth Chinese people, for whom time is money, Australia is at most a 12- or 13-hour plane ride away, compared to the 16 hours at least it takes to get from China to Las Vegas. The time zone adjustment between China and Australia is also a lot less fierce than that between east Asia and the western United States. And yet there’s a mild tendency among Australians (possibly inherited on a cultural level from the British and the Irish, who first made up most of the European settlers) to see the glass as half empty in terms of their country’s international appeal. That might account for why back in April last year at the soft opening of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, the first question asked at the press conference was from a veteran Aussie television reporter. He wanted to know if Las Vegas Sands Corp’s new Singapore casino resort was going to be poaching VIPs from Crown in Melbourne. Crown is a specialist in catering to Asian high rollers and currently the leader in VIP gaming in Australia with a national market share in revenue terms of more than 80%. There’s a lot at stake, as the Australian casino VIP trade is currently worth about A$25 billion (US$24.9 billion) in rolling turnover per year. Sheldon Adelson, the Chairman and Chief Executive of LVS, gave a ‘glass half full and rising’ answer to the journalistic inquiry—in the best American tradition. He said the international market for casino services is not a zero sum game. Rich people like to travel; and many of them have to move around to conduct their business in an increasingly globalised economy. More and more millionaires spawned by Asia’s economic rise means more and more business for the whole regional casino industry. If any Australian VIP gaming executives were worried about their role in life since the opening of the Singapore casino market and the expansion of Macau, there’s some good news. Tabcorp—a leisure and entertainment conglomerate probably best known to outsiders as an operator of off-course totalisators for the Australian horse and dog racing industries and of slot halls—has reorganised its casinos division with an eye on the Asian high roller trade. In early 2009, it hired an American to lead the charge. Larry Mullin is an executive credited with turning around business at the Borgata in Atlantic City after the region’s punters started deserting the boardwalks of New Jersey for the sidewalks of the Las Vegas Strip. He’s going to give his Asian high rollers fresh glamour and entertainment at Star City—Sydney’s only licensed casino—with the aim of expanding Tabcorp’s current 20% share of the country’s high roller market. The company’s three casinos further up the east coast in Queensland are also getting a makeover, as we explain in this month’s cover story. Mr Mullin also promises a near-forensic attention to his VIP players’needs while they’re at the gaming tables. That’s important. For every English-speaking, foreign-educated Chinese executive coming to visit a son or daughter at an Australian university or to see an old chum from college days, there are many more Chinese millionaires for whom a trip to Australia will be a decidedly exotic experience. Creating a good cultural fit between Tabcorp Casinos and Chinese players doesn’t just mean having staff that can speak Mandarin and Cantonese. It means having a team that understands Chinese and Asian VIP gaming etiquette inside out. That’s something Crown Melbourne already prides itself on, and it’s Crown that potentially has most to lose from the Tabcorp charge, whatever the latter company might say publicly. The Australian VIP pie may be growing—expanding at the rate of about 12% a year for the past five years, according to Mr Mullin—but Tabcorp is clearly aiming to get a proportionately bigger slice of the new pie than Crown. Such competition can surely, however, only be a good thing as Australian casinos seek to build on their natural advantage of being located in beautiful surroundings in the ‘Lucky Country’. Michael Grimes We crave your feedback. Please email your comments tomichael@asgam.com The Casino Regulatory Authority of Singapore In December’s edition of Inside Asian Gaming we ran a story called ‘The Illusion of Lawmaker Control’ discussing the prospects for the licensing of casino junket agents in Singapore. The story used a photograph of Casino Regulatory Authority of Singapore Chief Executive T. Raja Kumar without copyright clearance from the CRA. The CRA has also asked us to point out that neither Mr Kumar nor any member of the CRA staff was involved in providing information for the story. We apologise to the CRA for the unauthorised use of the photograph and any confusion that may have been caused as a result of its placement in the article.