Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING DECEMBER 2018 22 a responsibility to simply get it right. Keen followers of the list will remember that in 2016 we completely overhauled the Power 50 ranking methodology and in an effort to be more scientific and objective in the rankings we introduced a numerical “Power Score” for each person on the list. This proved popular and we have continued the tradition since then. Power Score points arise from a number of factors including the GGR of the person’s organization (or a surrogate comparative measure if necessary), a weighted “carving up” of those points between the top senior executives with key policy control of that organization, adjustments for whether the person is hired or has a major equity position, their length of tenure, how active in business initiatives the person has been in the prior 12 months, the long-term gaming pedigree of the person, the jurisdiction in which he or she operates and many more. Some factors are necessarily subjective, but we’ve always assigned a points value in an attempt to be objective. We have done this without any predetermined idea of where any person should or should not be ranked. At the end of the day, in our industry the concept of “power” generally comes down to direct or indirect control of money. The greater the GGR controlled, the greater the power. But what, exactly, is control? It’s about influence, it’s about who is the ultimate decision maker, and sometimes it’s simply about who is the person everyone in the room looks to for the answers. In the same way that a country is a country because other countries say it is, some people are powerful simply because other people say they are. Here are some other questions that have arisen during the selection process: What countries count as Asia? As west as India, as south as New Zealand, as east as Saipan and as north as Mongolia. ASIAN GAMING POWER 2 0 1 8