Inside Asian Gaming

JUNE 2015 inside asian gaming 17 Cover Story LOYAL TO THE CORE While expanding its mass market and non-gaming appeal, Galaxy’s second phase makes a major commitment to its core customers, VIP players, and reaches out to the coveted premium mass segment. The 254-key Ritz-Carlton Macau is the chain’s first all suite hotel, each suite measuring at least 85 square meters (900 square feet), glistening with marble and gold. “[W]e would go so far as to argue that the Ritz-Carlton room product is currently the best in Macau,” Union Gaming Research Macau says. The Ritz-Carlton Macau also aspires to high service standards, with in-room check-in, personalized stationery, and complimentary baseline—still to be granted in 2015, all likely earmarked for Melco Crown’s Studio City Macau due to open later this year and, like other new Cotai resorts, designed for up to 500 tables. Those numbers worry a lot of investors and executives, but Union suggests a different view of the situation. Union assumes that Macau regulators, while sticking to their overall maximum of 7,392 tables by 2022, will award tables in excess of yearly cap limits to accommodate new projects scheduled to open through 2017. Union suggests that each big box Cotai resort will, like Galaxy, get 150 tables at opening, Landmark’s new casino in Macau Fisherman’s Wharf will get 70 tables and the putative Louis XIII luxury casino will get 66 tables. That adds up to a total of 886 tables and would leave an additional 561 tables to be awarded after 2017, potentially an average of more than 90 additional tables for each of the six new Cotai resorts. By then, Macau’s slump may be over, and the gaming market could be all about table numbers again. “When it comes to tables, I will never say, ‘that’s too many,’ but I think that for the current market 150 is very much acceptable,” Galaxy Entertainment Group Vice-Chairman Francis Lui said at the property’s 27th May opening. The expanded property provides one of the market’s broadest array of non- gaming attractions. New features improve Galaxy’s strengths, including its VIP appeal and wow factor Grand Resort Deck, while adding new dimensions. Suite at the Ritz-Carlton Macau Lai Heen restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Macau