Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING MAR 2019 22 COVER STORY help local people, especially young people, to start up businesses and [continue their] education. We [want to] be more regarded as part of this society, and certainly we’re committed to that. MC: Do you see more taxes and more regulation with retendering? FL: Probably the government would want to be a little bit more quantitative and clearer in their asking in the bidding process. We would not be surprised by that. MC: What do you see as the biggest threat to Macau? FL: First and foremost is regional competition. With so many other countries following our footsteps to use gaming as a catalyst to improve their business, the economy, the tourism industry, we need to be strong and sophisticated in our services to make sure that we will maintain our competitiveness. To me, it’s not a matter of just growing, but it’s got to be sophisticated. It’s got to be special service. You can take a look at what the other countries are doing and with Japan’s gaming industry looming, we know that you’re going to have a very strong competitor closer to Beijing and Shanghai than us. The other challenge here I feel is that while we are wanting to get bigger, stronger and more diversified, the talent, the driving force is something that we have to be able to reach an agreement with the government and the community: How do we do it together? We understand that and we support the government and the community wanting to make sure that certain industries are being protected, but at the same time, we have to ask ourselves the question: How can we do it, making sure that at the same time we don’t lose competitiveness? We do offer a lot of training and we do actually have a program where we give priority to local people for promotions. While we are all doing that, at the same time, we still need to be realistic and say that from here on, Macau’s not just competing among the six of us. We’re competing with