Inside Asian Gaming

March 2015 inside asian gaming 21 Insights IAG : You’ve been at Solaire now for 16 months. What was going right when you arrived? Mr Arasi: We have a fantastic property here that puts us in a competitive position with any integrated resort in the world, both in terms of its facilities, quality level and experience. The other thing is that I believe we have the best service people, the best team members, I’ve ever worked with. That was a strong asset right out of the box. What needed improvement? There were a number of things we had to do that related to the operational execution and that was related to many of the operating departments. The organizational structures needed to be repositioned. We had a major recruitment effort to reposition how we were going to operate going forward and that is on the marketing side, that is on the operational side, that is in almost every aspect of the operation. Of course, we had to get the revenue up to the right level, and we had to run the business in a way so that when revenue came in, a much higher percentage of that would flow through to the profit line. How about working with Bloomberry Chairman Enrique Razon Jr? Mr Razon is a very active chairman, and he is the chief executive officer. It won’t surprise you that he is supremely smart, a very, very quick study. He’s very decisive. But what you see in how he operates every day and in the direction that he gives, he’s very attuned to driving shareholder value, and he has an incredible sense of what works and doesn’t work. He has had that incredible sense not only in the ports business but in other businesses. You can see that touch now in the integrated resort business. And how has it been working with Pagcor [Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation], the casino regulator? Pagcor has a strong commercial awareness. Because they’re an owner and operator I believe it makes them an effective regulator. They understand the business thoroughly. And they understand this business in the Philippines context. Clearly, Pagcor understands the potential of the business because this Entertainment City is really being driven by them. What about working in Manila? I think the Philippines and Manila is the best quote-unquote people place that there is. It’s something that I’ve come to know as “famous Filipino hospitality”. That’s our secret sauce here, Filipino hospitality, how they respond to the guest in a high-touch, very personalized, very genuine, very warm sense that is very, very distinct. What is Solaire’s VIP/mass mix at this stage? Is it where you want it to be? We somewhat have casino nirvana. What I mean by that is we are very nicely balanced between mass and VIP. It’s a little bit more VIP than mass, but it’s a relatively small difference. That’s a good position to be in. The mass, of course, gives you a good foundational commercial environment, and the VIP allows you to incrementally add on top of the good, solid, profitable mass business, so we can participate in both. The other thing that you have here is because we’re diversified pretty well in our foreign business, having it not almost completely come from China. Here it comes from a multiple of countries, and we still have a substantial contribution from China. We get business from Malaysia, from Thailand, from Singapore, from Indonesia, from Korea, from Japan, as well as a nice big chunk from China. We do have a robust domestic market here. It’s a domestic market that is not yet at the level of Singapore or Macau, but it’s healthy. It’s a growing economy, it’s a growing population, it’s a domestic market that is increasing its ability to have discretionary spending, which helps both gaming and non-gaming revenue. What do you have to do to make the market grow and perhaps reduce reliance on domestic players? We truly don’t need to see it as an either/ or situation. The single biggest thing that Not to make light of a billion dollars, but a billion dollars goes a long way in the Philippines when it comes to developing an integrated resort physically. Thomas Arasi