Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | 54 K angwon Land is the largest of South Korea’s 17 casinos. It is also the only one where locals are allowed to play, and owing to that exclusive position, there’s hardly ever an empty seat in the house. On weekends, there are line-ups for seats at the tables. The slots, meanwhile, operate at around 95% occupancy. That high occupancy made the migration of Kangwon Land’s slots over to a new management system a challenge. “Of the 960 machines, 940 of them are always online, and the reason 10 or 20 are vacant is because players go for smoking or toilet breaks,” explains Chiang Lai Fatt, General Manager-Asia Pacific Casino Systems for SPIELO International. “Initially we only had four hours a day to migrate, and each day we could only work on migrating one bank so it didn’t affect income,” adds Mr Chiang. ”Despite those challenges, SPIELO International was able to ramp up its resources to complete the entire migration between August and November last year, accomplishing a smooth transition on time and on budget. The SPIELO system continues to run securely and robustly since its start in August 2012. “We are extremely happy and satisfied with SPIELO International, their Casino Systems products, and also all of their staff that we had to deal with. The whole Kangwon Land Proving Ground SPIELO International™ recently carried out one of its largest casino systems installations in Asia at Kangwon Land in South Korea. Kangwon Land offers the perfect venue to demonstrate the robustness and flexibility of the company’s offering modular solutions that operators can “just plug and play,” as Mr Chiang points out. “We also allow our customers to choose the modules they need, which most of the major systems providers do not allow.” SPIELO International also customized certain elements of GALAXIS for Kangwon Land; for example, providing Korean language support for the system. Kangwon Land offers the ideal proving ground for a casino system’s robustness. “This project highlights our system’s reliability to handle high levels of player traffic. To give you some examples, every migration was so smooth that it hardly affected our daily business. We would like to thank SPIELO International for their efforts on this project,” commented Ju Haejung, Senior Manager, System Management Department at Kangwon Land. Kangwon Land issued the request for proposals to replace its existing casino systems in 2012, and SPIELO International was the selected supplier because of its flexibility in pricing and its ability to respond to the customer’s specific requirements. A key strength of the GALAXIS™ casino system is that it offers robust, market-tested, The Kangwon Land IT team, from left to right: Seonuk Choi, Assistant Manager; Haejung Ju, Senior Manager; Do Hwan Kim, Manager; Namgyun Kim, Assistant Manager