Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | September 2009 56 Briefs Regional Briefs L’Arc triumphs Macau’s latest casino, L’Arc, is due to open at the end of this month. It will be the 18th venue run directly by Dr Stanley Ho’s casino operating company, Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM). The property, on Macau peninsula, will add 142 tables and 400 slot machines to the Macau market. RGBMacau, a unit of Malaysian gaming equipment manufacturer RGB Ltd, will manage the slot machines at L’Arc. SJM’s development partner on the hotel portion of the project is ChowTai Fook Enterprises, a sister business of Hong Kong retail chain Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Company Ltd. Chen Yu Tung, who holds a stake in Dr Ho’s infrastructure investment company, STDM, and is one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, runs Chow Tai Fook. The 300 hotels rooms in the property will be branded as the New World Hotel, as a name check to Mr Cheng’s Hong Kong property development and management business, NewWorld Development. Good show for Bally Bally Technologies, Inc., a provider of slots, video machines, and casino-management systems for the global gaming industry, says that L’Arc Macau and its slot management partner RGB Macau has bought a range of Bally Systems equipment for the new gaming venue, which is due to open in late September. They include: Bally’s SDS slot-accounting and player-tracking system; 420 Bally iView player-interface displays; the company’s CMP Casino Management System with a junket module fully adapted and configurable to Asia’s requirements; and the TableView Real-Time Table Rating and Player-Tracking system. In addition, L’Arc chose Bally Power Promotions, a system that allows casinos to convert player’s club points and promotional cash into playable credits at the table and gaming machine without having to visit the club booth. “Bally met all of our needs on both the table games and slots side of our business and gave us the most confidence that they will be a solid long-term partner with solutions as we develop our business in the Macau market,” said Paul Tso, the Chief Executive of L’Arc. Cath Burns, Bally’s Vice President and Managing Director, Asia- Pacific, described the deal as “exciting and a great honour”. Junket juggling A decision on whether to allow junket operators into the Singapore casino market still hangs in the balance only months before Las Vegas Sands Corp’s Marina Bay Sands and Genting Group’s Resorts World at Sentosa, the city state’s first integrated gaming resorts, are due to open, according to industry sources. The broad requirements for junket promoters intending to operate in Singapore are listed under Section 110 of the country’s Casino Control Act. But only months before the first of the city-state’s two integrated casino resorts is due to open, the detailed regulations for junkets have still not been published. The reasons for the delay have not been given officially by either the Singapore government or the city’s Casino Regulatory Authority. In the absence of any official word, speculation has focused on two main topics. The first is that a debate about junkets is still going on within the government. The second is that either LVS or Genting Group, or both, have lobbied the government to prevent junkets from being allowed in. The first scenario sounds plausible if one accepts the assumption that junkets have the potential to create as many problems, in terms of crime and business transparency, as they solve in creating high roller betting volume. The second scenario—lobbying by the operators for a junket- free market—would only make sense if the operators had confidence they could bring in enough so-called ‘direct’players (i.e., those with a direct contractual relationship with the casinos for gambling credit) to take up the slack. A hotel room at L’Arc The Bally iView Marina Bay Sands