Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2011 52 going to continue blossom. Do you feel that perhaps there is a bottleneck coming soon following the Galaxy Macau opening, especially the big queues at the ferry to get in? Do you think there might be some issues in the next couple of years? There are those bottlenecks but if you look at Golden Week or Chinese New Year where the bottlenecks have been, if there can be a spread over time, there is still an awful lot more visitors that could come in under the same infrastructure. You can still handle millions more people. But that infrastructure thing will improve. The light rail is going to improve it and more and more immigration situations. I think Macau has yet to find how significant it’s really going to be. It is the largest gaming destination in the world already, but it’s got a long way to go to use the capacity that’s nearby. Singapore is now on its way to becoming number two possibly. And Marina Bay Sands, your property there’s been running for just over a year now. Is that on track to achieve your expectations there, to achieve ROI within the timeframe you’ve expected it? I think our investment there is close to US$6 billion. We expect to do – we did over a billion dollar in our first year in EBITA. We expect that to grow. I think a four or five year payback in that situation, anybody would be happy with that return on investment. We should do that very easily without even selling an asset like our mall, which we expect to sell maybe in 2013 or 2014, which can provide as much as US$4 billion back for our US$6 billion investment just on the mall alone. I think Singapore is sort of in some way an anomaly. There’s only one competitor. There won’t be any more than one for a considerable time, if ever. The market is very, very vibrant in all areas. So it was a great decision to go for it, get it and build it. I’d like to have two or three, I wouldn’t have to do very much. You speak of your one competitor in Singapore, that’s Genting of course. People actually expected Marina Bay Sands to take the lion’s share of the market very quickly, but Genting has somehow managed to hold on to the lead. Why do you think that is? What have you learned from Genting over the past year? Well, in the early days, Genting won both the market share game in VIP gaming as well as mass market. We are now winning the mass market game and they continue to lead in the VIP game for a variety of reasons. We think over time, there is a significant product differentiation between us and Genting and a location differentiation. They are in more of a family area, more in a resort area, it’s a little off the beaten path, and we are very close to where the city is, so basically we’re advantaged on the mass market. On the VIP end, they’ve more aggressive than we’ve been and doing a better job. But they had a head start on us because of all their “We should [be able to recoup our investment in Marina Bay Sands] very easily without even selling an asset like our mall, which we expect to sell maybe in 2013 or 2014, which can provide as much as US$4 billion back for our US$6 billion investment.” INSIGHTS