Inside Asian Gaming

October 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 21 In Focus Is there room? I don’t know. That’s just it. I don’t see anybody on the horizon that can do it. I want to see Macau’s numbers be as good as they can possibly be. I’m very pro-companies, very pro-Neptune, obviously. But I’malso pro for the concessionaires and the government and for the region. It doesn’t sound like you’re concerned about the market slowing, or possibly even contracting at some point. Well, again, Neptune is not in that category. If you take our numbers froma year ago, they’ve literally doubled.We’re as strong as ever. Is there slippage? Somemaybe aren’t doing the numbers that they did a year ago. Possibly some are overextended in terms of the table positions they’ve taken on. And then there’s the little guy I told you about. There’s no one factor. They always blame China, it’s GDP and all these things, it’s not that, the market is so big that China can do what it wants to do and the gambling dollars are always going to be there for Macau because there is no competition. It’s all going to come here. But certainly I believe that sometimes the junkets are their own worst enemies in terms of doing business. If you’re not professional and you’re not well-funded, that’s two items, and if you’re not positioned in the casinos properly and if you’re not everywhere like we are, you can lose business that way, not because there are economic reasons, it’s just the fact that you’re not doing a good job yourself. “I believe that sometimes the junkets are their own worst enemies in terms of doing business. If you’re not professional and you’re not well-funded, that’s two items, and if you’re not positioned in the casinos properly and if you’re not everywhere like we are, you can lose business that way, not because there are economic reasons, it’s just the fact that you’re not doing a good job yourself.” So it’s a tougher market, competitively, more than anything? Yes. I mean, I’mnot bothered by it all, and none of the concessionaires are bothered. The only people bothered by it are Wall Street. Because they love to be bothered by different things. They just key in on these slippages that we’ve had. But if you look, if you try to analyze where the slippage is, nobody can do that. You can’t say which junket is down, you just say VIP is down. But it could be one or two junkets that are skewing the whole thing. Could be. Nobody knows. If everybody was like Neptune and everybody ran their operation like Neptune and SunCity you wouldn’t have the slippage. It would be growing. Do you see listings like Neptune’s as a way forward in this respect? There are only four at the moment. But they differ in terms of focus, profitability and reasoning and purpose. I mean, Amax, they’ve been suspended for so long, I don’t know if they’ll ever trade again. Neptune is the only pure play. The others have other side businesses. But certainly there are advantages. Access to capital. Fund-raising. And there is a tremendous comfort level among the concessionaires. They like that. Sheldon Adelson told me himself that he really likes our company, and one of the reasons why he likes our company is because we’re listed. It creates a platform of honesty and integrity, and certainly regulatory transparency. Not too many can offer that to a concessionaire. And he appreciates that. That’s the advantage. “Sheldon Adelson told me himself that he really likes our company, and one of the reasons why he likes our company is because we’re listed. It creates a platform of honesty and integrity, and certainly regulatory transparency.”