Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JUL 2019年7月 亞博匯 26 MC: Let’s talk about recent Melco Resorts results. LH: They were okay. We judge ourselves by relative performance. We’ve changed our compensation scheme for our senior management as well, based on relative performance. I’ve seen it over the years with the evolution of Macau – a rising tide raises all the boats. For many years we had a management team – and thankfully those people are gone – that during the rising tide, they’d pat each other on the back and say, oh my god, we’re so smart, we just can’t get this thing wrong. In Q1 we had two great months and for whatever reason, that one bad month in March dragged the whole quarter down. As I tell the management team, it’s a learning lesson: just because we had two great months, we can’t take our foot off the pedal, ever. Macau is the greatest gaming market in the world, but it’s also the most competitive, so if you want to play in the super league you have to be performing every single game. You have to kick ass every single day. But again, everything is a building block and frustrating as it is, as many times as I’ve lost it – and it’s not easy for me to lose it, because I’m kind of a mild-mannered, Canadian happy person – it is part of the building process. Morpheus needed to ramp up. And as much as Morpheus is an iconic addition to City of Dreams, and I was hoping it would be a plug-and- play – you plug it in and it’s good to go – it’s taken time to fine tune the right customer mix. MC: Do you fear that you built a beautiful property for a market that’s not there? LH: That fear always exists within me. To be honest, for every “The House of Dancing Water” success, we’ve had a few things that just didn’t connect with people, whether it was too far advanced or people just didn’t get it. When we were building Morpheus and I was walking through, I was like, I hope this billion dollar thing isn’t going to be hated. It’s so modernistic. But thankfully the guests love it. The hypothesis we’ve always had is, people are going to continue to elevate themselves. They might’ve “It’s one thing to show Japan or other jurisdictions pretty pictures of what your architect came up with, it’s quite another to actually deliver on it and execute it.Mymessagehas always been, you need to look at the track record.” 「向日本等其他司法管轄區展示建築師設計的 的漂亮圖片是一回事，實際交付並執行則完全是 另外一回事。我一直認為，你需要看看過去的記 錄。」 COVER STORY