Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2012 18 GLI S ince opening an office in Macau five years ago, Gaming Laboratories International, the worldwide leader in the testing and certification of machine games and systems, has parlayed the rapid growth of casino gaming in East Asia into strategic opportunities in a number of new and emerging markets. The debut of the company’s first regional Interoperability and Testing Center in 2009 coincided with GLI Asia being named a recognized testing lab of Singapore’s Casino Regulatory Authority. Last June, GLI crowned its expansion into the interactivespacewiththelaunchoftheworld’s first global e-gaming technical standard, developed in conjunction with Technical Systems Testing (TST), which the company acquired in 2010, enhancing its ability to serve regulated jurisdictions likeFirst Cagayan in the Philippines, where GLI/TST was first to conduct testing. More recently, the company has zeroed in on lotteries as a key growth area, and on the heels of the formation of a global lottery consulting group last fall, GLI Asia has been engaged in major lottery projects in mainland China, South Korea and Taiwan. Inside Asian Gaming sat down with Ian Hughes at G2E Asia to learn more from GLI’s Australia-born managing director of Asia Pacific Operations about the company’s role in ensuring the integrity of the region’s machine gaming and systems technologies and helping to further the development of those markets. IAG : How is GLI positioned in East Asia right now? And where do you want to be? Ian Hughes : We’ve been involved in Macau since 2004, doing certifications. So we’ve been involved from the very beginning. We’ve always wanted to have a strong presence to provide service for Asian- basedmanufacturers. Really our vision hasn’t changed: that was to have a local facility where manufacturers in the region could have their products tested locally, not only for the Macau market, which is where the lab originally started doing most of its work, but also for international markets. That lab now has been providing certifications [for Asian manufacturers] for the U.S. markets. So it was always envisioned. And that’s how GLI labs operate globally. And since the acquisition of TST, that allowed us to bring in their lab that was here in Macau as part of the GLI Asia lab. That allowed us to do a lot of the Putting Asia to the Test For GLI, growth in the region crosses all sectors Ian Hughes