Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2011 20 INSIGHTS Macau. We’ve got an awesome team of locals. When I got here back in 2006, I had a vision to hire locals, build locals because I believe that your business is stronger if you have great local talent. People, like myself, that have a particular expertise to come in and open up a market and hire the right people, honestly, I’m made to look good by my guys and my team. Yes, absolutely, it’s a challenging labour market. The hiring process takes a lot longer because there isn’t necessarily the depth of talent, because we’re taking a very technical industry, very IT-focused industry, and we’re starting it up in a new place. We’ve touched on the system side of your business; now let’s talk about the slots. How are your slots going at Galaxy Macau? Yeah, slots are great. Galaxy Macau, I mean, it’s only early days now, but it’s pretty exciting. The slot floor has a lot of different games and vendors we’ve not seen before, and everybody looks like they are performing and there are players all over the slots. I think Galaxy has done a fantastic job of building a pod-like experience with tables and games. Slots next to tables, so it’s a real combined feel. One other area of your business is server-based gaming, something that has been a bit slow to catch on in Asia. I mean, server-based gaming is something we’ve been committed to for a long, long time, and have been delivering it steadily for years now. I think the hesitation on server-based in Asia is getting the return on investments—it’s very difficult. Until that happens, we’re just not going to see a take- up of server-based gaming. You recently led Bally into the highly competitive Australia market. How’s that going? Fantastic. I mean obviously really exciting for me to go back into Australia being that’s where I started my gaming career. And we’ve hired an awesome team, led by Michael McNee, Aristocrat veteran, over 15 years’ experience with Aristocrat in game product, General Manager of game product. Very critical for us to come into Australia, is understanding that market, and building the right products. We’re doing that. So we’ve been very fortunate to pick up some great people and lead that Australia effort. What about Singapore? Do you have anything targeted for that market? Singapore was fantastic last year. The two big integrated resorts opening up and we were The iDeck™ touch-screen button deck replaces traditional button decks with a multi-touch interface that increases player interaction