Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | September 2009 44 like that has failed miserably. Australia is a mature gaming market with 200,000 machines. [One gaming machine for every 105 people, based on the latest population estimate of 21.1 million people.] When you go into Australia with a product, you are setting up a full-scale operation to meet the market needs: you’re designing product, you’re implementing specific protocols. It’s something you want to get right the first time. We want to go in. We want to get it right. We believe from a company point of view we’re well positioned now. The experience we’ve had in the region serves us well to go into a market like Australia and we’re looking forward to it. We’ve done a lot of hard work to build here [in Macau] and we want to make sure that translates into another big, mature, market. How, if at all, would the experience in Macau and the rest of East Asia help you in Australia? CB: The product that we’re playing in the region is product that will work in Australia. Not all of it will, but some of it certainly will. I think there are some parallels between the player in Asia and the player in Australia. Understanding that [Asian] player I think helps us and positions us for Australia. It gives us some insight. Are there a lot of ethnic Asian players in the slot markets in Australia? CB: Absolutely. If you look at some of Aristocrat’s core strengths when they came into this market [Macau], they brought games that had been designed for Chinatown in Melbourne and in Sydney. They’re great games, they’re global games. The fact that they were made for an [ethnic] Chinese market and that the Chinese love them, has meant that globally they translate [work] everywhere. They are knockout games. They took that experience fromAustralia and brought it toMacau. Bally will do the same thing from here to Australia. We’ll do that not only with our Asia Pacific experience, but also with our knowledge of Europe, South America, North America—we’ll draw on all of it, and we’ll come up with the right product mix for the Australian market. Are equipment replacement cycles getting lengthened in Australia as a result of the global recession? CB: I don’t know. In Australia you can certainly see some quite old product on the [slot hall] floor, but there could be other explanations for that. One of the reasons it’s still on the floor is probably the loyalty of the customers to that product. So why would you [the operator] take it off? The same thing happens in Nevada. There are products where sometimes the operator says: ‘I don’t want them [the product] removed. I don’t care if there’s a latest and greatest’. It’s because the player loves it because there’s such a familiarity to the product. Is there a common denominator for achieving success in all these different markets? CB: The key for us from the point of view of product on the floor in Asia is we started small and built. So what you’re seeing from us throughout Asia Pacific is a targeted approach to each customer of building a bank [of machines on the floor] at a time. We’ve gone through an evolution of products. We started with the CineVision™ [wide screen] video display, then we moved into a reel. We started with Hot Shot, then Blazing 7 and then we added another three games to that portfolio. We had Quick Hit and then we added to that; video, stepper and built on the success of those games. Then what you see is a mixture of product. So whether it goes into an upright cabinet or whether it’s stepper or whether it’s video, we’ve built on that. If you take our CineReels™ product, there’s no other product like this in the world. Macau is the first market where we released it and now it’s throughout that market. It’s also going into Singapore. Building on the Quick Hit theme, after the stepper, which we launchedwith [inMacau], we thenwent into a new cabinet, the Quick Hit Platinum cabinet, offering an even better playing experience and a different style of game. For us it’s very much a question of: ‘What’s worked?’, then going and building on it and expanding it so we come up with something that’s a little bit different. When you look at the casino floor and the Bally product—from the player’s perspective, they don’t really care who makes the product. They just want to know it’s something different and a good experience. That’s what we’re aiming for. This market continues to need choice. We’re seeing new players [from different countries] coming into the market so you’ve got to be able to offer them choice. We’re starting to see now in Macau a move from that ‘Build it and they will come’ scenario to the competitive landscape we expected. So now it’s about‘What do I offer the player? How to I create incentives for the player? How do I make them stay in my property?’ We’ve just signed contracts with L’Arc [the new SJM casino in Macau] for both our slots systems and our table systems. They’ll be using our promotional products, so you’ll start to see that built. How you take care of your player is becoming a very important part of the Macau market. Bally Bally slots at last June’s G2E Asia in Macau