Inside Asian Gaming

DECEMBER 2017 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 79 INDUSTRY PROFILE before we agreed to come up here. To be truthful, when I joined Aristocrat they had said there was the prospect of international opportunities. They told me, “If you do 18 months and deliver like we feel you can, you decide where you want to go next.” You obviously take that with a grain of salt but it happened quicker than I thought and the opportunity was too good to resist. IAG: Was it an immediate yes? LR: In my mind it was an immediate yes but I had to go home and have a conversation with the fiancé! It was funny, the day I went in to have a chat with our Managing Director Mitch Bowen I kind of knew something was on the horizon and going into it my missus said she would move anywhere in the world. I got home and said, “How about Macau?” To be honest, Asia was the region that excited me the most, particularly being Australian. The link between Australia and Asia and the reliance economically we’re going to have in the future, if I had to pick one region it would be Asia. Macau specifically I didn’t know a lot about but my Mum was born in Hong Kong so it was a pretty easy conversation to have with Mum and Dad – they said to go and do it, so now I’m here. IAG: How has the transition been from Australia to a completely different society like Macau? LR: I guess officially I started on an ominous day, September 11, but we’re a few months in now. There has been a bit of commuting between Macau and Sydney but that’s pretty much come to an end. It’s challenging spending that time away from your partner and working through those little logistical things like finding an apartment and opening a bank account. You tend to take those things for granted. I mean, at the moment most Macau’s Portuguese architecture is a major feature of the city “I was always interested in gaming and we had a gaming services business at Tabcorp even though I wasn’t directly involved in it. Aristocrat provided that opportunity and I wanted to be a part of it.”