Inside Asian Gaming

IAG SEP 2021年9月 亞博匯 26 COVER STORY face masks, the provision of hotels as quarantine facilities for returning travelers and tourists and most recently working with government to boost vaccination rates. By hosting a raft of educational seminars and free vaccine centers for staff and their families, the concessionaires have helped boost Macau’s vaccination rate from 8% in May this year to 43% as of mid-August. Yet when it comes to CSR in Macau, there is much more than meets the eye. In recent years the Macau government has been placing an increasingly strong emphasis on CSR initiatives and the concessionaires’ obligations to the Macau community, the Chinese motherland and society at large. It’s long been known that integrated resorts with gaming are stable only when they have a symbiotic relationship with the community in which they operate, in what might be termed a “social license”, which sits right alongside the privileged gaming license each operator enjoys. This is not a new phenomenon. Even back in the days of the pre-liberalization gaming monopoly in place for the last four decades of the last century, Dr Stanley Ho shrewdly shared his wealth with the people of Macau, sometimes acting as a kind of behind-the-scenes last resort when the government urgently needed funds for some form of community need. For example, he long took on the cost of annually dredging the waterway between the Macau peninsula and Taipa so that marine traffic could safely pass.