Inside Asian Gaming

April 2012 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 23 What major recent sales of your chips, layouts and other products have you made around Asia over the past few months? In Macau, we have delivered more than 300,000 chips to new projects in Cotai in 2011 and 2012. This includes value chips, tournament chips and wheelchecks. Outside Macau, we have supplied millions of chips throughout Asia over the last couple of years. This includes Singapore, where we are one of the only two gaming chip suppliers who are approved [by the Casino Regulatory Authority] there. We also have very stable business in other countries, such as Korea, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and India. For layouts, we supply to more than 10 properties in Macau now and the number of casinos using our layouts has been increasing rapidly. We have many regular customers for both our wool and synthetic layouts. We delivered more than 5,000 layouts last year only in Asia. What do you see as themajor opportunities for your business in Asia over the coming years? Obviously there will be a lot of opportunities for our industry in Asia. Some countries will open up their gaming markets, very possibly in the next fewyears.We expectVietnam, Myanmar, Laos and India will be very good markets for us. We already have a significant amount of established business in those places, and we feel that the scale of the business of our clients there is growing very quickly. And maybe we will have another very big opportunity in Japan, where our company’s head office is located. We still don’t know when, but we are sure Japan will step into the Asian casino race soon. Do you foresee any threats to your business, such as increased competition from other Asian suppliers? Yes, there are always many new companies trying to break into the market. Some companies offer their products at very low prices. That gives us certain pressure to lower our pricing, even though the costs of material and labour have been increasing. I guess this is good for customers and it makes the industry healthy. However, most of those newcomers disappear in a short period of time. There must be several different reasons for that, but I guess the main ones are a lack of quality control, poor service and the fact they are only able to offer a very limited product range. So although the price offered by such newcomers may seem attractive initially, you should always consider the quality and the continuity of the business very carefully. Otherwise, you will end up paying more at the end of the day.