Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2011 18 INSIGHTS – Inside Asian Gaming In the latest instalment of IAG’s video interview series with leading members of the Asian gaming industry, Bally Technologies’ Vice President and Managing Director of Asia-Pacific Cath Burns explains the reasons for her company’s dominance in the gaming systems business, as well as the challenges of operating a business based in Macau. The interview can be viewed online at the IAG website, www.asgam.com INSIGHTS B ally’s Cath Burns is widely considered one of the rising stars of Asian gaming, recognised for her leadership and performance in building Bally’s market share in slots and systems in Macau from what amounted to a standing start. Ms Burns has also shown another key attribute of quality leadership—the ability to create a strong local team capable of executing her plans and developing the regional business via their individual insights and initiatives. That has allowed her to play a key role in the company’s launch last year in Australia and New Zealand, knowing that the core business in the rest of the region is fully supported. Ms Burns spoke to Inside Asian Gaming publisher Kareem Jalal for IAG ’s INSIGHTS series at the recent G2E Asia Expo. She discussed the performance of Bally’s systems and slots in the core Asian markets of Macau and Singapore. IAG : Galaxy Macau is the latest in a series of system successes for Bally. What is it about your systems that have made you the market leader in Asia and the world? Cath Burns : I think systems is a process where you build it, and you build it carefully, and you honour your commitments and you execute. When I first came to Macau, we looked at the systems business and we basically said, what out of our products meets the market requirements and what doesn’t. So when we analysed what the market required, we looked at our products and went about making them better for the market. We wrote all of our core systems— Cath Burns SDS [slot floor monitoring], CMP [player tracking], TableView [table management]. Particularly, TableView because that handles the junket markets, the premium player markets as does CMP. You worked very quickly to develop market—specific products for Macau. Correct. Obviously, the table games market is unique to Asia and unique to Macau specifically. We had to really look at the product and ask, is it ready for this market or not? It wasn’t ready for the market. In talking to our customers, getting requirements, doing business studies, we identified what had to be done. We actually started at SJM properties with L’Arc. That was our first property, then Oceanus, Casino Lisboa, and then onto StarWorld, Galaxy’s first property, and then onto Grand Lisboa and then onto Galaxy Macau. Getting good labour in Macau can be quite a challenge. What are the other challenges of operating a business based in Macau? We’ve been really, really lucky in