2 minute read
Editor’s Note
CASINO
The magazine for the owners and management of international casinos
Published by Outsource Digital Media Ltd
Editorial:
Associate Editor Asia:
Bill Healey bill@outsourcedigitalmedia.com
Associate Editor EMEA:
Aydin Guney aydin.guney@outsourcedigital media.com
International Correspondent:
Lyudmyla Kyrychenko lyudmyla.kyrychenko@outsource digitalmedia.com
Production:
Designer: Stewart Hyde stewart@totaldesignworks.com www.totaldesignworks.com
Accounts: Helen Holmes accounts@outsourcedigitalmedia.com
IT Director: Pasha Kuzminskiy pasha@outsourcedigitalmedia.com
Publisher: Peter White Tel: +44 (0) 1892 740869 Mob: +44 (0) 7973 273714 peter@outsourcedigitalmedia.com
Welcome...
Here we go again. Just when 2021 was looking like The Year of Sports Betting, on comes the rampage of the Delta variant of Coronavirus, fueled by superstition and paranoia. Thanks to unvaccinated “Covidiots,” egged on by opportunistic media and political figures, a voodoo mentality has taken hold and experiences we once took for granted—like this month’s Global Gaming Expo—are imperiled. While it looked like the autumn and winter would be safe for the return of conventions, already Las Vegas has seen two of its tentpoles, the National Association of Broadcasters and the AVN Show (the Academy Awards of porn) collapse, making for a mighty shaky large-event ‘recovery.’
And things were looking so well, as American Gaming Association President Bill Miller discusses in this issue. Miller, no alarmist, is also taking no chances with G2E, mandating a belt-and-suspenders approach that requires attendees to be both masked and vaccinated. We applaud his vigilance. Fortunately for the casino industry, it now stretches far and wide beyond Las Vegas, and regional gaming is powering a comeback that’s far much stronger than anyone could have imagined. As Deutsche Bank analyst Carlo Santarelli recently concluded, after crunching the numbers, gaming is out-performing the rest of the U.S. recreational economy by tens of billions of dollars.
Would that were the case in some overseas markets. Stocks for Macaobased casino companies are still wobbly after losing $18.4 billion in value from newly proposed changes, undoubtedly handed down from Beijing. These include the imposition of a government overseer in every Macanese casino, federal approval of dividend payments, shorter leases and even a possible reduction in the number of casino concessions – very bad news for some companies that have put all their chips on the gambling enclave, especially at a time when it remains a shadow of its former self, thanks to Covid-19.
One could say this was predictable. You don’t own a casino in Macao. The government lets you have it and, when your lease is up, they can come and take it. The industry’s complacency – and that of Wall Street – has been badly shaken by this dose of realpolitik. The worst apologists for the Communist system, Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, are respectively dead and irrelevant. It is their more-responsible successors who must deal with the new reality.
To close on happier notes, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Wild Coast Sun casino-resort in South Africa, take a deep dive into artificial intelligence (which may not be so artificial after all), visit MGM Resorts International’s hit property, Park MGM, and lead off with the success story and new vision of Century Casinos. See you at Global Gaming Expo!
