Inside Asian Gaming

March 2015 inside asian gaming 23 Insights “One of our biggest challenges is the geopolitical situation between China and the Philippines and some of the negative publicity that has gone over there. I can tell you that being from the United States, I feel safer here in Manila than I do, I’m sorry to say, in many cities in the United States.” Conventional wisdom says that it’s difficult to get Chinese players, especially VIPs, to come to the Philippines, What has Solaire done to overcome that? There’s some truth to that. One of our biggest challenges is the geopolitical situation between China and the Philippines and some of the negative publicity that has gone over there. I can tell you that being from the United States, I feel safer here in Manila than I do, I’m sorry to say, in many cities in the United States. There’s no doubt that the Philippines has had some challenges in its overseas perception. However, the gaming business is very much a relationship business. As we’ve been building out our marketing infrastructure and our marketing organization and our offices, we’ve been adding team members to Solaire who have relationships with existing players. Our team members have been able to express with great confidence to their customers— and these are people who really trust our team members, they’ve had relationships for a long time and they often know each other personally as well as in the gaming host/patron relationship—“Come to Manila, come to Solaire. I just moved here, don’t worry, you’re going to have a great experience here.” And we have incredible stickiness once people get here. The challenge is to continue to chip away at the PR static on the line that we’ve had, and the opportunity has been when matter of how they like to game—and we’ve found those smaller salons really help us. In light of the slump Macau is experiencing currently in VIP play, have some of the VIPs who are staying away from Macau been coming to Solaire? The biggest story of 2014 for us was the organic growth of our marketing in China. There’s been a lot of talk about the slump in Macau, and clearly there is a slump in Macau. But Solaire has been organically growing its China business, really, since the end of 2013, and that really started taking off in the first quarter of ‘14. We have the wind at our back to a degree. What’s really driving the organic growth is that the Chinese themselves, as an outbound market, both gaming and non-gaming, they’re just becoming more intrepid. They’re becoming more discerning. They’re becoming more adventurous. They’re more proactively choosing their destinations. They’re not necessarily going where the original Chinese travelers went. They know the global landscape, particularly the people who come to these integrated resorts, who have that kind of purchasing power. They’re getting a lot more sophisticated. So they can demand more choices. We set about starting late last year and early this year in an organic growth story. And you can see it in each one of our quarterly results this year. The slump in Macau, I think that may have added a little to the growth story, but for us the big story has been the organic growth story.