Inside Asian Gaming

October 2017 inside asian gaming 19 INSIGHTS Muhammad Cohen: Why is Caesars the right choice for Japan? Steve Tight: A number of differentiators position Caesars well for Japan. The first would be addressing the government’s overwhelming focus on creating the most regulated integrated resorts in the industry with the most stringent regulatory standards. Because Caesars operates in the most jurisdictions of any of the major operators, nearly 20, and because all of our regulators in these jurisdictions have the ability to opine on our compliance anywhere we operate in the world, we basically have to operate to the highest common denominator, which I think reassures the Japanese government that we have the highest levels of integrity and that we would operate within the sort of standards that they would want and expect. In our discussions with the government, they’ve spoken specifically about one of our biggest advantages, which many will argue has been disadvantageous, being that we are not in Macau. The Diet members that we’ve spoken to have said that the fact that you are not in Macau is a huge advantage because in Japan they are not looking to replicate the Macau model – in fact anything but that, given their perception of how things operate in Macau. So we come with a clean sheet. We know that the government has concerns about addictive gaming behavior and criminal activities that the public perceives to be associated with our industry, which we know in reality is anything but the truth, both in terms of the addiction and crime. On the addiction side, I think the Japanese misunderstand gaming addiction behaviors. They’ve talked about the current state of addiction in Japan as quite high but I point to the fact that they have the opportunity for gambling via pachinko and other forms “In our discussions with the [Japanese] government, they’ve spoken specifically about one of our biggest advantages, which many will argue has been disadvantageous, being that we are not in Macau.” Caesars Palace in Las Vegas of gambling, yet they’ve never funded any programs to address gaming addiction. In our integrated resort industry, we were the first to adopt reasonable responsible gaming standards, where we put in place programs to identify problem gamblers who have addiction issues. We train our employees to identify them. We provide those who have gaming addiction issues with information to address their gaming issues. Most importantly, we fund programs to address the addiction. As a result, you find over and over in jurisdictions in which integrated resorts have been introduced recently, levels of addiction have actually gone down since the integrated resorts were open