Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2012 16 Different perspective—bathroom offering a unique view onto the old part of Macau what I told them exactly was a license had been offered to the provincial government, but then they chose not to take it. Beijing offered Hainan a casino license? Yes, but they declined it. Hainan receives support from the central government amounting to about 30-40 billion renminbi a year (US$4.7-6.3 billion), but if they take the license, they need to surrender that support. The Hainan government decided not to pursue the license, because they decided there was a risk the revenue from casino taxes would not equal the support they get from the central government. How is the running of this place split between Success Universe Group and SJM? The license is under SJM, and although some of the workload is split between the two, a lot of the operations are done by Success Universe because SJM is not able to manage too many casinos themselves. So Success Universe Group handles the promotion and marketing? How did that arrangement come about? Yes. Prior to 2003, Success Universe [then known as Macau Success] was a VIP hall operator. And in order to compete with the foreign competition, Dr Stanley Ho decided that he needed to ally himself with his existing hall operators, the more productive ones, a lot of which have now become property owners. What are the terms of your deal with SJM? The profits are shared pro rata according to our relative shareholdings. In addition to that, a sort of license fee has to be paid to SJM on all the revenue generated in the casino. That’s between 3-5% of revenue. Japanese pachinko parlor operator Maruhan Corp holds a stake of approximately 5% in Ponte 16. When the project was getting off the ground, there was a lot of talk that the Maruhan connection could drive Japanese players to the property. Has that actually happened? I think our exposure in Japan, or even our percentage average visitors from Japan, is slightly higher than other casinos. But we don’t see a substantial amount of gaming customers coming from Japan compared to what we get from China. So Mainland Chinese are still our main target audience. How does your VIP operation work? We have two outsourced VIPs halls and one in-house hall. Of the two outsourced halls, one is more connected around the Shanghai region and the other is more connected in the Guangdong region. As for the hall we operate ourselves, we have moved the customers served by Macau Success during the time we were operating VIP halls into that hall at Ponte 16. We have 18 outsourced VIP tables and operate 9 ourselves. There are a further 81 mass market tables at the property. Although the Michael Jackson Gallery is good for Ponte 16’s image and branding, does it actually drive play at the casino? Not necessarily. As I mentioned, we get about 10,000 visits per day into the casino, whereas for the gallery during regular days we get a couple hundred and then maybe during holidays a few thousand—so considerably fewer visitors to the gallery compared to casino guests. The most important thing about the gallery is the marketing function it provides, especially by allowing us tomarket ourselves in mainland China, where we can promote the gallery but not the casino. Last year, we joined up with NewWorld Department Store to do a touring exhibition in various cities around China, displaying Michael Jackson memorabilia. This year, we are planning to do probably the largest Michel Jackson exhibition, a tour in China again, with more than 100 pieces of memorabilia. I don’t think many of the cities will have ever seen an exhibit like this before. Uniquely situated—Ponte 16 sits on Macau’s Inner Harbor and offers easy access to the surrounding heritage sites Ponte 16