Inside Asian Gaming

The Asian Gaming 50 – 2013 The successful opening of Manila’s Solaire Resort & Casino stands as a glittering US$750 million advertisement for the singular abilities of Weidner & Co. and the impact that Global Gaming Asset Management has begun to exert on the world’s casino landscape. The one-time president of Las Vegas Sands Corp. has moved aggressively to ensure his Weidner Resorts is first to market in Taiwan, where gaming has been approved on the Matsu archipelago, and in May it was announced that GGAM had been chosen to manage Baha Mar Casino & Hotel, the centerpiece of a $3.5 billion, 1,000- acre destination resort in the Bahamas. Scheduled to open next December, Baha Mar is majority funded by Export-Import Bank of China. The lead contractor is China State Construction Engineering Corp. Significantly, it’s the first foray for both in theWestern tourism and leisure market and a tribute to the esteem in which Mr Weidner and GGAM are held. As with Solaire the strategy is to build a globally recognized brand designed, as Mr Weidner has put it, for “targeting customers in key markets, including Asia”. That covers a lot of ground. But then he knows a good bit of it. He came up in the heyday of Atlantic City’s intensely competitive day-trip market as vice president of hotel operations at Caesars. He later moved down The Boardwalk to the Sands, where he served as president, and eventually headed Pratt Hotels, the hospitality giant that owned the Sands and was developing casinos and hotels at that time in the Chicago metropolitan area, in New York City, in Orlando and Palm Springs, Fla., and in Puerto Rico. He’s best known for his 13 years as Sheldon Adelson’s right hand, 20 William Weidner Chairman and CEO Global Gaming Asset Management President and CEO Weidner Resorts when as head of Las Vegas Sands from its launch as a public company in August 2004 through March 2009 he was instrumental in building the company into a global powerhouse. Few can equal the skills he exhibited as a diplomat and ambassador in guiding LVS into Macau and Singapore. Certainly no one has exceeded them. The respect and goodwill he’s shored up along the way have served GGAM well. He’ll be drawing on all of it, and a healthy dose of imagination besides, to bring off Matsu, which presents structural, regulatory and geopolitical challenges that are, to put it mildly, unique. To meet them he’s conjured plans for a veritable resort city to open in phases with gaming as the anchor for a cluster of hotels and leisure attractions designed to bring 5 million-7 million visitors a year to the tiny island chain 10 miles off the coast of China’s Fujian province. The current price tag is $2.5 billion, a good portion of which is earmarked to bring the islands’ primitive electrical, water treatment and transport infrastructure into the 21st century. A consummate negotiator, he’s reached across the Taiwan Strait to sell officials in Fujian with its 37 million inhabitants on the wisdom of joining forces, and last December, Weidner Resorts signed a preliminary agreement with Hong Kong ferry operator Chu Kong Passenger Transport for a service between Fujian’s capital of Fuzhou and Matsu. Weidner also has proposed the development of a supporting tourist hotel near Fuzhou, whose 4.4 million residents, together with the 5 million or so living in and around the port city of Xiamen farther south, are considered key to the success of whatever ultimately gets built on Matsu. It’s reported that Fuzhou officials like the hotel idea, as does Taiwan’s pro-business Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang Shih, whose department has drafted a framework for regulating resort-scale gaming that is under consideration by the national parliament in Taipei. Chen Lip Keong founded NagaCorp in 1995, the same year he obtained a 70- year gaming license in Cambodia and a 21 Chen Lip Keong CEO and Executive Director NagaCorp monopoly until 2035 on casino operations within a 200-kilometer radius of the capital, Phnom Penh. He listed the company in Hong Kong in 2006 after Singapore rejected the listing, and the stock price has been climbing ever since (he still controls more than half of it). Between this year and last, the price doubled, partly on news that NagaCorp is expanding. In November 2012, the company broke ground on Naga2, which is expected to be operational by 2016. When it is, it will include new hotels, restaurants, entertainment and MICE facilities and an underground shopping mall. NagaWorld is the principal asset of NagaCorp, which reported a 15% year-on- year increase in revenue in the first half of 2013 to US$152 million despite two business disruptions during the period, including a week-long period of national mourning in February after the passing of the king’s father and a holiday period of sorts in June in the lead-up to July’s elections. The property is substantial by regional standards—660 hotel rooms, 1,700 electronic gaming machines and 170 live table games, 15 food and beverage outlets, a nightclub, a spa, 25,000 square meters of meeting space—and there are no statutory limits on gaming capacity. Naga2 will add a further 1,033 rooms, 200-300 table games and 500 EGMs. Vietnamese players are NagaWorld’s mainstay, accounting for an estimated 35- 40% of main floor revenues. But VIP play, most of it Malaysian, is an increasingly important part of the mix. Chinese, not surprisingly, also feature prominently, and are the country’s fastest-growing visitor group. Five or so junkets are driving most 34 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | September 2013