Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming June 2014 12 And a considerably broader remit for you as well. At City of Dreams you headed up machine gaming. Your responsibilities now encompass the entirety of casino operations and marketing too. Yeah it’s a big umbrella. But an amazing breath of fresh air. It’s been just fantastic. And quite an adjustment, one would imagine? It’s a lot broader, no question. But in terms of the marketing side of things, I’ve always been interested in it. I looked after certain areas of it in New Zealand. I actually went to China 14 years ago to learn Mandarin so that I could get into the marketing side of the business. We did a lot of the work for marketing over at City of Dreams for a lot of the initiatives we kicked off. And the number of initiatives we created and kicked off there—room development, all the private rooms and so forth, we were heavily involved in all that. I don’t feel it’s something foreign or new to me at all. I’m completely enthused about the opportunity to mold it to a sort of a vision that I have. And to be accountable as well. I’m quite happy with that situation. I’ve always been waiting for this opportunity. So it’s really a dream job for me. How important is your Macau background in that respect? We’re seeing a lot of experienced Macau management making the move to Entertainment City. What are the advantages in your view? Macau is the mecca of gaming for the whole world. So Macau to that extent looks excellent on anyone’s resume. When I look out my door here at the executives we’ve got in place, 80-90% of them have Macau experience. Over half have Singapore experience. All of them have very deep Asian experience. Australasia as well. They have a broader background than people who have only worked in Macau. It’s a different market down here. So there are a lot of advantages to having that experience. In terms of the relationships with the junkets, how they roll, how credit is issued, all that kind of stuff, how to take care of the very high end of the Chinese clientele, what kind of food and beverage offering they want, how the rooms need to be, it’s invaluable to have that Macau experience. But I wouldn’t say it’s the be-all and end-all either. We’re also going to be appealing to Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Malaysian customers. So people who have spent time in different jurisdictions and different countries really bring a lot of value to the table. What about the takeaways from your own experience? What do you see as key? I helped open Sands Macao, helped open Wynn Macau, helped open City of Dreams. I’ve worked for three of the big boys, I guess you could say. I’ve sat in the board rooms, I’ve been through strategy sessions, and there have been some tremendous lessons. So I think that’s given me a good grounding. In addition to that, I started in Macau in January 2004, I finished there in December 2013, so a few days short of doing 10 years. I’ve been through the boom times, I’ve been through the bust times, and I’ve been through the boom times again. And while it wasn’t necessarily, personally, all that pleasurable to go through the 2008-2009 period in Macau I think it rounded me out as a business person and gave me a much better take in terms of, OK, you always hope for the best, but you need to plan for the worst as well. How are we going to prepare for things, how are we going to respond? If we expect a certain segment of our business to be fine, and it isn’t, what’s the next plan, where do we move? In the boom times anyone can make money, right? But the bust times, that really challenged us, and I learned some tough lessons. It’s enabled me to come down here to a new market, to be able to learn about a new market, and to be able to lay out a pretty solid business plan for how we’re going to take more than our share of both the domestic market and the international sphere. “We’re modeling everything on not getting landing visas. But it’s in everyone’s interest. And certainly the Andrew Tans and K.T. Lims and Ricky Razons and Henry Sy and Lawrence Ho, they’re not going to be against pushing through something like landing visas. It helps all of us and helps tourism in the Philippines as well, I mean, massively.” Cover Story