Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | June 2011 56 conversations with the governments both in Vietnam and Korea have been about restricting locals with a payment, or restricting locals with a certain amount of payment that they can enter in the course of a year or the course of month, to be able to prevent them from coming too frequently or not being able to afford it. But we must have the support for the kind of infrastructure that we put in, in terms of an integrated resort, we have to have some local play in order to be consistent when we don’t have convention and we don’t have tourists. Otherwise, you’ve got an awful lot of overhead sitting there not generating any revenue. Do you find those government attitudes somewhat irrational because there’s nothing to stop these people from going overseas and playing? I wouldn’t call it irrational. Governments are governments. Depending on where you come from, you can say whether they are irrational or not. My sense is that in our discussions with Japan, with Korea, with Vietnam, that in these particular countries, they have political reasons why certain constituencies have concerns about local gaming even though they have betting in all these countries— boat races, horse races and a lot of things like that. So they begin to see the virtue of our system because our system drives tourists and drives conventions and meetings and entertainment and builds an enormous amount of jobs. I think Macau’s an interesting example. If you look at City of Dreams, if you look at Galaxy, you are seeing other operators coming inwho are sort of attempting to followa somewhat integrated resort pattern. And that’s going to drive tourism, other types of visitations, other than gaming. Although in an Asian market, gaming is always going to be very important, compared to a US market or European market. But still for a destination to maximize the contribution, our type of facility does that. Are you in discussion with any other countries in the region? Taiwan is another one that could be happening now that the government is increasing its effort to lobby there. There was a ‘no’ vote on the Penghu referendum but now it seems the government is doing more to lobby there. Do you have any thoughts on whether the next referendum in Taiwan might be successful? Well, I think the referendum is coming in another island. I think it is a 5km bridge from the mainland. The government would like to have it because they are losing traffic coming out to play here and other places. But I am not positive about that passing. We would be not interested in having a 5km bridge to get to us. If we could be on the mainland near Taipei, we would be interested because there are 28 million people in Taiwan. For the same reasons that we’d be interested in Korea, or Japan or any of these countries because we can do convention, meetings, MICE and entertainment business as well as gaming for the population as well as foreigners. So getting to the island, the infrastructure would be difficult for us and would be difficult for employees. We need a big employee base to run one of these places. There are 15 thousand people in the building we’re in right now. India is often discussed but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere right now. There have been quite a lot of Indians coming to Macau and specifically to Venetian. But do you see them gambling? Oh yeah, Indians play. There are very few countries in the world where people don’t gamble. It’s just a question of how often and how much. But they play. They play during certain times of the year; Diwali time, special times for Indians. There are casinos in Goa in India. I don’t know how successful or unsuccessful they are. India lacks a really good trade show and exhibition centre as well big conventions in order to compete in the Asian circular convention market. They don’t have that. There is some small place in Delhi but it’s not nearly big enough. And I think outside of Mumbai or in Delhi would be an ideal position for one of our kind of integrated resort. Once again, I wouldn’t expect the play level to be the same as this part of Asia. But there’d be significant other business that could make it attractive. But getting anything done in India is not easy. One of the things that you mentioned is that you might be looking for someone to manage your relation with the government in Macau. Is that going anywhere? Can you shed some light on that? We have an arrangement with a gentleman by the name of Bowen Leung, who originally worked for the Hong Kong The Venetian Macao INSIGHTS Hard going—India’s bureaucracy can make doing business in the country difficult