Inside Asian Gaming

september 2016 inside asian gaming 45 Asian Gaming POWER 50 2 0 1 6 Hong Kong’s eminently creative and well-connected Albert Yeung first got into casinos when Macau was still a Portuguese colony, winning the license in 1993 to develop Vietnam’s first legal gambling hall – in Do Son, a venerable resort town near Hai Phong – which he flipped to Stanley Ho, and venturing a couple of years after that into operations on his own, in North Korea, of all places, opening a casino catering to the Chinese border trade. He entered the Macau market as an investor in VIP rooms in Mr Ho’s former flagship, the Casino Lisboa, and established himself in operations in 2006 as a sub-licensee of Mr Ho’s Sociedade de Jogos de Macau with the opening of the Grand Emperor Hotel, a 307-room resort with 77 table games and 400 slots that does a tidy business (together with the Inn Hotel Macau in Taipa, formerly the Best Western) that topped HK$1.72 billion in revenue in the financial year ended 31 March. You can’t miss the Grand Emperor. Its 26 stories tower over a section of downtown not far from the Lisboa. There are always people snapping photos out front, posing around the mock carriage tiered loyalty program for both gaming and non-gaming customers and an online magazine and complementary smart phone service for guests at the Sofitel-managed hotel. Ponte 16 benefits from some unique geography too. As the only casino on the city’s historic Inner Harbour it’s got a sizable footprint, 2.3 hectares in all, which provides space for a more expansive offering than the run of its peers on the Macau peninsula: an outdoor pool, a fitness center and sauna, a L’Occitane-branded spa, nine restaurants, cafes and lounges, seven multi-purpose meeting rooms and extras a peninsula visitor might not expect, like a 1,600-square-meter interactive experience called “Macau 3D World”. parked there, an ornate, gold-painted model of what European royalty would’ve tooled around in in the bad old days. There are a couple of Caucasians dressed as Coldstream Guards, bearskin hats and all, flanking the entrance. In the foyer the floor gleams with 78 one-kilo gold bars arrayed under plastic. It’s a nod to the showman in the 73-year-old Mr Yeung, a quality Stanley Ho particularly admired. “No difficulties can baffle him,” he once said of him, “nor are there any hurdles he cannot overcome.” Indeed, he built a Hong Kong watch retailer’s into an empire consisting of four Hong Kong-listed companies with holdings in property, financial services, retail, mass media, hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. His Emperor Entertainment Group, a major player in the massive Cantopop market, includes a subsidiary in film and TV production with credits that include 2012’s CZ12 starring Jackie Chan (who’s a Grand Emperor investor), 2015’s To the Fore , Hong Kong’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, and the first Chinese film to break US$100 million in mainland China (2010’s Let the Bullets Fly ). The casino at Ponte 16 is struggling along with the rest of the Macau gaming market during the current downturn, but that doesn’t diminish what Hong Kong financier Sonny Yeung and his Success Universe Group have achieved in their efforts to set the resort apart from most of the casinos that operate as independent contractors under the SJM concession, with their focus on gambling and little else. SJM owns 51% of the operation, which helps. Success Universe, for its part, continues to hone an innovative approach to marketing that can be traced to its controlling stake in a Canadian-based travel company that specializes in the high-endMICE and FIT sectors. Highlights at Ponte 16 include a comprehensive Sonny Yeung EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CHAIRMAN Success Universe Group Power 590 last 34 Score year Claims to fame Partnered with SJM to establish Ponte 16 Family has historical links to Stanley Ho 43