Inside Asian Gaming

September 2013 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 15 hours. Casinos are prohibited in both China and Japan while South Koreans are permitted to gamble in only one casino in their country. While Mr Ho has widened his regional purview, Melco Crown Entertainment remains firmly“on track and on budget”with its Macau expansion plans, he said during the recent second quarter earnings announcements. The company’s second Cotai resort, Studio City, is slated for a mid-2015 opening. Plans call for 300-400 gaming tables and 1,200 gaming machines, although, critically, the casino portion of the resort has yet to be approved. The prevailing sentiment is that it will be. He also said he expects construction on a fifth hotel tower at City of Dreams to commence by the end of this year. “This iconic additional hotel tower represents another powerful addition to our wide array of amenities and attractions that City of Dreams already offers its premium-mass and high-end customers, providing another tool to further extend our leading position in this key segment,” he said. Melco Crown’s expansion plans will be aided by its improved liquidity and access to capital following its secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2011. (The company has been listed on NASDAQ since 2006.) The secondary listing coincided with the completion of a significant localization of the company’s top management, marking a distinct turnaround from the early days of the joint venture between Mr Ho’s Melco and Australia’s Crown Limited. Initially, a lot of the senior appointments had been former Crown executives from the Australian side of the partnership. This probably made sense at the time because of Crown’s extensive experience with running gaming operations in its home market. Gradually, however, as Mr Ho found his stride and felt out the market, the Crown managers have been going back home, and the company has gone from strength to strength as all senior positions have been assumed by locals. “Because Lawrence Ho and the team are actually Chinese, and we grew up in this part of the world, we feel we understand the behavior of customers here better than anybody else,” explains Mr Ho’s second-in-command, COO Ted Chan. Steve Wynn’s plate is piled high these days, with $2 billion in greenfield gaming investments planned in the US in the Boston and Philadelphia areas and a Web gambling license pending in New Jersey, where there’s talk he might buy back the Boardwalk casino he built a generation ago. But by far most of what he’s tucking into is Chinese fare. He delivered parent Wynn Resorts’ second-quarter earnings call from Macau, appropriately enough, given the dominance of the market’s contribution to corporate earnings, and it’s likely he’d been spending a good part of that time in the city poring over plans for his newly namedWynn Palace and touring the 20-hectare Cotai site. More than $100 million in groundwork is under way there, the 5 Steve Wynn Chairman and CEO Wynn Resorts