Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming November 2015 40 much, and you lend out a little bit, and it’s not property scrutinized as much as you would want it to be, then all of a sudden it slows down, next thing you know you’re looking for somebody to help you, and that’s where the slowdown has been. Who are the big five? Neptune, SunCity, David’s Palace, Jimei Group, Golden Resort Group. AERL has invested in about 29 tables. They’re a mid-cap. We’ll call them a mid-cap. There is no other word for them. I give them credit for listing. I don’t think they represent the industry that well. They add some confusion to the marketplace. They’ve been through several auditing firms. I’m glad they’re there rather than not there, but I wish they would tone it down and standardize themselves a little bit. Maybe as they grow they will. … I’d like to see more big ones develop. I’m talking about bigger junkets. I’d like to see a big six or big seven. I think that’s good. 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’m also 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 from a year ago, they’ve literally doubled. We’re as strong as ever. Is there slippage? Some maybe 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. So it’s a tougher market, competitively, more than anything? Yes. I mean, I’m not 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. Blast from the Past “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.” “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.”