Inside Asian Gaming

September 2014 inside asian gaming 45 in Japan’s staid machine gaming industry, he took Dynam public in Hong Kong back in 2012—the first pachinko operator ever to do so, in fact, the first Japanese company in history with a primary listing on the HKSE—and followed that up last year with a HK$273 million investment in Macau Legend Development’s IPO. Interestingly, the 68-year-old was in supermarkets, not gaming, when he took two Tokyo arcades he inherited from this father and built them into the second-largest machine gaming operation in Japan with an innovative Wal-Mart style sales strategy that emphasizes value and now encompasses 375 pachinko halls and delivers more than HK$12 billion (US$1.5 billion) in annual revenues. He believes pachinko has global potential as an entertainment proposition, a conviction he first tested several years ago in South Korea, where the game became such a sensation—the number of arcades ballooned to 7,000 in just one year—the government shut it down. He plans to test it again in Macau. His partnership with Macau Legend calls for inclusion of a pachinko gaming area at the new Macau Fisherman’s Wharf. He’s got a seasoned Korean team to head it and a pipeline of next-generation games that will offer varying skill levels of play and other new features. Yoji Sato Chairman Dynam Holdings Pachinko king Yoji Sato is looking ahead to the likelihood that the Japanese government will legalize casinos and is positioning his Dynam Holdings to be a major player when it does. When Dynam announced earlier this year that it was in talks with several top operators—Melco Crown Entertainment, Galaxy Entertainment, SJM Holdings and South Korea’s Paradise Group among them—on a possible tie-up for a resort casino in its native country, the aggressive hand of Mr Sato was clearly in evidence. Renowned for a marketing and investment savvy that are rare SKYCITY Entertainment Group operates three monopoly casinos in New Zealand—in Auckland, Hamilton and Queenstown— and two in Australia, in Adelaide and Darwin. Profit for the financial year ended 30th June fell 22.6% to NZ$98.5 million (US$82 million), though on a normalized basis, factoring out fluctuations in win percentage in the high-roller segment, it was down a more moderate 8.1% to NZ$123.2 million, and normalized revenue was off only 2% at $$843.3 million. An improved performance at the company’s flagship Auckland property and relatively steady returns from Darwin and Adelaide were masked by the impact on Australian earnings of a strong New Zealand dollar, which was on average worth 13% more relative to the Aussie unit over the 2013-2014 financial year. Revenue was also Nigel Morrison Managing Director SKYCITY Entertainment Group impacted by the ongoing A$300 million revamp of Adelaide Casino into “a truly world-class integrated entertainment complex,” as Auckland-based CEO Nigel Morrison describes it. The company started on the remodeling after finalizing an agreement last October with the South Australian government on a new licensing agreement that includes a 20-year extension of its casino monopoly in the state