Imperial Pacific International Holdings Inc., which operates the Imperial Pacific Resort on the Pacific island of Saipan, expects a loss for the year ending December 31, 2018.
In a March 8 filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, IPI said the likely deficit is “mainly attributable to the decrease in total revenue and the impairment of trade receivables,” reported GGRAsia. The group’s annual profit for 2017 was HKD637.5 million (US$81.2 million), down 32 percent from 2016.
From a bang-up start in 2015, IPI has slowly unraveled. At first, Imperial Pacific Resort made news because of the high volume of VIP bets at its casino, with per-table revenues that rivaled and even exceeded those in Macau. At the same time, however, IPI was racking up debts that more than cancelled out revenues. Last fall, according to a report in Forbes, IPI reported gaming revenue of HK$2.2 billion (US$281 million), down from HK$4.5 billion on a year-on-year basis. It also reported HK$13.7 billion in unpaid markers and wrote off HK$5.8 billion of that—after writing off HK$4.7 billion a year earlier.
The company and its still-unfinished resort have raised concerns for other reasons, including the use of illegal foreign workers, which led to an FBI probe; the inability to make payroll on time; and failure to complete the 340-room casino hotel on deadline. IPI claimed a shortage of qualified workers as one reason for the construction delay, then asked for and received yet another extension to complete the project, until February 2021. After the extension was approved, IPI fired 80 members of its labor force.
