Inside Asian Gaming

Asian Gaming 50 – 2010 rising labour costs in the Asian casino gaming markets, but also for the benefit of players by providing themthe true odds and correct payout for every game and every hand played. The company has also been building its gaming systems business in Asia, including slot management, customer relationship management and monitoring systems. Mr Kinsman started his gaming career with Olympic Video Gaming in Australia, which became Australasia’s No. 2 manufacturer under his leadership. The company was eventually sold to IGT Group in 1997 for A$178 million (US$152.8 million at today’s prices). Mr Kinsman also served as General Manager of Vidco, launching multi- terminal gaming products. Vidco was then sold to another group and renamed as Star Games in 1991. His next role was as CEO of Online Gaming Systems in Australia, where he set up the regional office in Sydney to service the Australian, Asia-Pacific and South African markets. Later, the company took over the worldwide assets of its then parent. Between 1994 and 1998, he served twice as Director of AGMMA, the Australian GamingMachine Manufacturers’Association (now known as the Gaming Technologies Association). In 2004, Mr Kinsman was headhunted by the online gaming provider Mansion Group as COO, creating ‘The Poker Dome’, a television series featuring poker games between theworld’s top players betting their own money. It became one of the top-rated shows on the Fox Network in the United States and beyond, generating a large pool of clients for Mansion. of the most exacting gaming regulatory regimes in the world, the approvals could open doors for Weike’s products in markets far beyond Singapore’s borders. The company is also expanding rapidly inMacau.Weike’s The Club at KamPek, inside one of Macau’s SJM-licensed legacy casinos, will have an extra 105 machines installed in November. And also that month, Weike will open another club with 200 machines at a different site, moving the company half way toward its target of having 1,000 machines operational in Macau by the end of 2011. Weike will soon have product in South Korea for the first time, and is installing the company’s first Pal X Poker tables in Star City casino in Sydney in coming months. Mr Kinsman is a passionate advocate of multiplayer electronic table game products, not only as an antidote for operators to 41 (38) Chen Lip Keong Founder and CEO NagaCorp NagaWorld’s founder Dr Chen Lip Keong appears to be taking Phnom Penh’s only licensed casino in a bold new direction. In late August, the management of the property in Cambodia’s capital announced it would refocus its strategy away from mid level high rollers (typically with check in levels of US$25,000) and instead focus on mass-market players. How much this is NagaWorld adjusting its strategy to meet market realities and how much it is conscious effort is an interesting question. Certainly, the company has been stepping up its offer in the slots segment through participation deals. NagaWorld suffered more than most Asiancasinodestinationsduring thefinancial crisis of 2008-09. Many of its middle ranking VIPs, drawn from neighbouring countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, simply stayed NagaWorld also has the biggest conference hall in the country, as well as a hotel complex. As Cambodia’s economy booms and foreign trade and exports increase, the resort’s operator, Hong Kong- listed NagaCorp, will be well positioned to drive further mass market business via conferences and exhibitions—in themanner of TheVenetianMacao. The operator also has a strong competitive advantage, as it is the only casino allowed within a 200-kilometer radius of Phnom Penh. “Our remodelling strategy is focused on the fact that we want to build predictable results… sustainable results, rather than just explosive growth,” Kevin Nyland, NagaCorp’s Vice President of Investor Relations, told the English-language newspaper The Phnom Penh Post . The idea, Mr Nyland added, was to draw steady yields from steady business and avoid too much volatility. That should please NagaCorp’s public investors. Results for thefirst half of 2010, published in August, showed NagaCorp’s net profit for the period totalled US$21.1 million, up 83% from the US$11.5 million recorded for the first half of 2009. The mass-market segment, comprising the main floor and the gaming machine zones, generated 70.2% of the US$67.1 million gross revenue—a sharp contrast to its 46.4% contribution last year. Junket revenue fell to 29.8% of gross revenue from 53.6% for the first half of 2009. It brought in US$20.2 million this year from US$34.1 million in 2009. away. In the first half of 2009, VIP revenues at NagaWorld fell 66.8% to US$34.1 million from US$102.8 million in the equivalent period in 2008. One of the reasons NagaWorld previously eschewed the mass market in favour of VIPs is that local Cambodians are not allowed to enter casinos. Two years ago, nearly all the table activity involved foreigners playing in the VIP rooms, with a modest number of foreign visitors in the slot area near the lobby. But with the post war and post reconstruction return to Phnom Penh of the Cambodian Diaspora—many of them carrying foreign passports—there are potentially more mass market, high margin players to target. Dr Chen is an official advisor to Hun Sen, the prime minister of Cambodia. He is credited within the country for playing an important role in helping to revitalise the country’s tourism industry following two decades of civil war. An indication of the potential of themass segment canbe seen in the recent increase in the number of slot machines and electronic gaming tables installed in NagaWorld on a participation basis. In late August, Entertainment Gaming Asia, formerly known as Elixir Gaming Technologies, announced it had reached 670 gaming machine seats in operation at NagaWorld. That was a more than two hundred percent increase from the number of gaming machine seats the company had at the resort in January 2009. INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | September 2010 40