Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming December 2014 22 great acceptance across the marketplace. We have a new baccarat shuffler, Safe- Bacc, that shuffles and dispenses the cards without human intervention between the shuffler and the shoe, which we’ll be launching in Asia shortly. It’s been launched in the US. It should hit Asia before the end of the year. We’re looking at changes to the one2six [blackjack shuffler]. And we’ve got a few other projects in the pipeline which over the next 12 to 18 months will be released into the market. Utilities as a whole is a great business for us and we’re going to continue to develop in that area. We dominate the world in it, and we’re going to continue to dominate it. Electronic table games, another core strength, of course. What’s new there? We’ve rebranded all our electronic table games Fusion. Now you have the Fusion Hybrid, which has got the live dealer. We have our Fusion which has got the virtual dealers. We’ve got the roulette products, where you might have eight or 10 stations sitting around an automatic wheel. And we have the new TableMaster, where you’re playing either blackjack or Ultimate Texas Hold ’em at this stage: five terminals played like a table, left to right, but done with an electronic dealer and treated as a fully electronic product, where it’s not counted as a table. We’ll be bringing other proprietary games onto that platform. And that’s interesting to mention also. Our proprietary table games, we now have something like 25 titles. So whilst in Macau, because of gazetting, we only have Caribbean Stud, Casino War and Three Card Poker, if you look into Singapore, if you look into the Philippines, now we’re getting a number of our other titles into those markets. And the proprietary table games are all recurring revenue? Yes. Earlier you mentioned the expansion on Cotai and the demand that implies for e-tables. In terms of the live-dealer product, where do things stand? Do you see an opening for Fusion Hybrid? We do see an opening for the live hybrid here in Macau. There is no impediment to us for a customer to put our live dealer product on the floor in Macau today. We’ve been very successful; in fact, we’re probably No. 1 in market share outside of Macau, throughout Asia, with that product. We are rolling it out in Korea now, about four installations. We still hold the biggest floor print at Marina Bay Sands with 435 terminals. We’re in Resorts World Sentosa. We’re in Genting [Highlands]. We’re on cruise ships. We’re in NagaWorld with 183 terminals. We’ve got it in Laos. We’ve got it in Vietnam. We’ve got it in Cambodia. So everywhere outside of Macau our product is accepted by players and operators alike. We have Macau operators that love our product, and I believe you will see it in this marketplace, and it won’t be too long. Do you see opportunities for the virtual- dealer tables in Macau, particularly as the new Cotai resorts come on line? It’s interesting with virtual. If you go back to the early days of Macau, virtual was quite popular. Then it seemed to wind down a bit when the live-dealer products hit the market. We’ve actually got a couple of the virtuals out in a couple of spots. They’ve been there for a while. Virtual continues to grow in revenue, and one particular venue made us aware recently how much it had grown. So we believe it’s time now to bring the good new virtual products back into the market and to push them, and that’s one of the focuses we’ll be looking at in the next 12 months. Finally, the merger with Scientific Games: How will it change the way you operate? It’s an exciting time for the company. We can’t really talk about how the structure works. Obviously, there are going to be some synergies as we move forward. How does it feel for you to be part of this new giant? For me, being involved in mergers, bringing companies together and refocusing staff with product portfolios, bringing together two different cultures, from the point of view of my own career it’s something I haven’t done before, and it’s something I’m finding exciting. “We do see an opening for the live Hybrid here in Macau. There is no impediment to us for a customer to put our live dealer product on the floor in Macau today. We’ve been very successful; in fact, we’re probably No. 1 in market share outside of Macau, throughout Asia, with that product. …We have Macau operators that love our product, and I believe you will see it in this marketplace, and it won’t be too long.” Insights