Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2012 2 Editorial Inside Asian Gaming is published by Must Read Publications Ltd 8J Ed. Comercial Si Toi 619 Avenida da Praia Grande Macau Tel: (853) 2832 9980 For subscription enquiries, please email [email protected] For advertising enquiries, please email [email protected] or call: (853) 6680 9419 www.asgam.com Inside Asian Gaming is an official media partner of: http://www.gamingstandards.com Publisher Kareem Jalal Director João Costeira Varela Editor Michael Grimes Operations Manager Sarih Leng Contributors Desmond Lam, Steve Karoul I. Nelson Rose, Richard Marcus James Rutherford, Sudhir Kale James J. Hodl, Jack Regan William R. Eadington Graphic Designer Brenda Chao Photography Ike, Alice Kok, James Leong, Wong Kei Cheong Michael Grimes We crave your feedback. Please email your comments [email protected] Dungeons and Dragons It’s Asia’s turn to shine. A legal, licensed casino operator in this region would have to be doing something seriously wrong not to make money for itself and its investors. The question then becomes how much can be made and how quickly? There the story becomes more complicated. The needs of investors and the needs of communities such as Macau and Singapore do align in significant ways. If they did not, the multi-billion dollar resorts we see now would never have been built. Macau wanted to move itself into mass- market family tourism, not just a niche product for high roller gamblers. The incumbent operator—Stanley Ho’s STDM and latterly SJM—had neither the financial stomach nor the operational experience to go down the integrated resort path. Other investors from Hong Kong and further afield—as outsiders desperate to join the Macau party—did have the hunger (and in most cases experience) to give the Macau government what it thought it wanted. Singapore in its turn wished to boost local employment and tourism receipts by reinvigorating its role as a stopover destination; finding casino partners it believed would get the job done. Ten years into Macau’s opening up (seven if you count not from the date of enabling legislation to end Stanley Ho’s monopoly but from the opening of Sands Macao, the first truly mass-market gaming property) is probably a good time to assess progress. On one important point at least, the needs of the investors and the needs of the host authorities—namely the Macau government and the central government in Beijing—do differ. This is in the matter of truly liberalising the gaming market. What’s currently being experienced inMacau is not a freemarket—neither in terms of the number of casino operators allowed in, nor in terms of how the casinos are allowed to respond to the huge demand for gambling coming from China. The existing casino operators are more than happy to go along with the first policy, and have the good sense (most of the time) to play along with the second one, as well they might. But that doesn’t alter the fact that a political game is being played. Modern China—far from being the invincible economic behemoth portrayed in the more hysterical elements of the Western and Asian media—is actually riddled with contradictions, tensions and inequalities. While well-fed Western university graduates occupy urban spaces in London and New York under the vague banner of bashing the banks, not so well-fed or well-clothed Chinese people just a few miles away from Macau have been staging sit-ins in their own villages to stop rapacious developers and corrupt officials from stealing their land—sometimes at the cost of their liberty and even of their life. Perish the thought that any of their tormentors might be customers in Macau’s high limit rooms. China is not really capitalist. It is a gigantic experiment in socialist mercantilism, with economic and social policy directed at intervals from the centre. The government recently told people to watch fewer television reality shows and tune in to more culturally appropriate and patriotic transmissions. It backed that up by cancelling or reducing the amount of Western-style popular entertainment in the schedules. In Macau, the social experiment manifests itself as an attempt to provide a safe outlet for Chinese people’s pent up desire to gamble, and to see if China can create a world-class tourism destination to rival the likes of Las Vegas. But as with all social experiments—whether in the great public housing building boom in Europe after the Second World War, or the collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s—the authorities have no plans to relinquish control of the levers. This doesn’t mean that Beijing will suddenly do a U-turn and turn off the supply of visitors to Macau. But it does mean that political needs and the protection of China’s current social system will always trump the needs of the gaming industry. Remember that and the Year of the Dragon should bring you good things.