Inside Asian Gaming

September 2015 inside asian gaming 29 continues declining with hope for its revival in short supply. “Premiummass is currently what everybody is actually looking for to grow their markets,” Melco Crown Entertainment COO Ted Chan noted last year as the VIP slowdown began to take hold. “Our company really focuses more on the total experience of the customer, rather than cash, credit, rebate to customer, etc.” That “total experience,” according to Mr Chan, entails offering the right mix of hotel rooms, F&B, retail and perks and is something he has been striving to improve ever since he joined Melco Crown’s Cotai flagship Revenue at CoD was down 32% in the second quarter of 2015 to $654 million. Highlighting the relative resilience of the property’s mass-market business, while VIP rolling chip volume plunged nearly 50% over the year-ago quarter, mass-market drop was down just 10%. Total non-gaming revenue was down 5% to $63.8 million, generated over an array of offerings that include three global hotel brands— Grand Hyatt, Hard Rock and the Forbes 5-star Crown Towers—70 retail shops, 20 restaurants and bars, the city’s largest nightclub and its only successful production show to date, “The House of Dancing Water.” According to the 43-year-old Mr Chan, the experience will be further augmented by the company’s upcoming Studio City resort. “We are highly confident that Studio City, with its wide range of entertainment-inspired leisure and lifestyle experiences, is ideally positioned to further enhance the leisure destination appeal of Macau amongst ever-growing demand, not only from China, but also the regional and international leisure-seekers as we work to bring new and unique non-gaming attractions to the region,” he says. “The young and innovative culture of this company is bolstered by our understanding of the customer,” adds Mr Chan. “Because [CEO] Lawrence Ho and the team are actually Chinese, and we grew up in this part of the world, we feel we understand the behavior of customers here better than anybody else.” It’s a differentiating factor, and for reasons both obvious and subtle, an important one. “For any strategy setup or marketing initiative the No. 1 goal is to know your customer,” says Mr Chan. “So we spend quite a lot of time understanding customer behavior. A key part of Melco Crown’s mission to boost mass revenues is learning more about its customers’ preferences. “We do a lot of data- mining exercises to find out who are the best customers, the middle customers and smaller customers, who we put into different tiers, so we’ll be able to align the right service to the right type of customer,” he notes. Mr Chan took up his current positionwith the company in February 2012. For two years prior to that, he had been co-COO, Gaming, while Nick Naples headed operations. Mr Naples left in conjunction with Mr Chan’s promotion, the culmination of a gradual assumption of all senior roles at the company by Chinese executives. Mr Chan is a longstanding and trusted associate of co- Chairman and CEO Lawrence Ho’s, having worked as his assistant between 2002 and 2006. He went on to head Mocha Clubs before leaving to become CEO of an outside company, albeit one that worked in close cooperation with Melco Crown—Amax Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed junket aggregator that played a key role in sustaining Crown Macau (now Altira), Melco Crown’s first casino, when it opened. He returned to the fold in November 2008 as president of Altira prior to assuming the co-COO position at City of Dreams in the summer of 2010. In the ports business that made him a billionaire, Enrique Razon started in Manila then went global. He’s doing the same thing in the gaming business. Bloomberry Resorts opened Solaire Resort and Casino in March 2013, the first property in Entertainment City, the 120-hectare (297 acre) casino cluster in the making on Manila Bay. Solaire has been a game changer and bar raiser for Manila. The opening of the Sky Tower last November took Solaire to another level, featuring a tropical garden lobby with twin waterfalls, leading to an all-suite hotel wing and expanded VIP gaming space, a theater and karaoke bar, with a retail mall and nightclub still to come. Mr Razon’s stamp is all over Solaire, from its positioning to appeal to high-end customers to its Philippine artworks, many of them from his private collection, Enrique Razon Jr Chairman and CEO Bloomberry Resorts Corp. decorating the property. The $1.2 billion resort became the Philippine gaming market leader this year, with first half gross gaming revenue of P15.6 billion ($347 million), up 10% from a year earlier, even though Entertainment City’s second IR, Melco Crown’s City of Dreams Manila, opened last December. “Solaire continues to experience steady and continuous growth especially in all gaming segments,” Mr Razon, controlling around