In a move to “optimize operating excellence,” Melco Resorts & Entertainment has replaced City of Dreams Property President Gabe Hunterton with current Studio City Property President David Sisk. In the corporate shuffle, City of Dreams Manila President Geoff Andres will relocate to Macau to take over at Studio City. And Kevin Benning, former vice president of gaming operations at City of Dream Manila, has been promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer at City of Dreams Manila.
Melco Resorts Chairman and CEO Lawrence Ho called the shakeup a “redeployment.”
“We are leveraging on key individuals who all have demonstrated their expertise in managing and delivering strong growth,” Ho said in a statement. “They have proven their innovative spirit in various geographical locations across the Melco group. We are confident that the cross-fertilization of new ideas and management initiatives will ensure that all our integrated resorts will continue to benefit from performance improvements.”
According to brokerage Sanford C Bernstein, problems in the mass and premium mass segments were Hunterton’s undoing. “While Hunterton was in the role for only a year, under his leadership the property had undergone considerable operational and marketing issues in mass (premium mass in particular),” said analysts Vitaly Umansky, Zhen Gong and Cathy Huang. “Hold rate in Mass has been a considerable issue partly due to operating changes introduced by Hunterton.”
Sisk joined Melco Resorts in 2016 as property president at Studio City. Melco called him “a veteran casino financial and operations executive with over 25 years of experience with major casino developers and operators, including Sands China (Macau), Wynn Resorts, Resorts World Sentosa (Singapore) and Caesars Palace.”
Andres, a 30-year veteran of the gaming industry, was appointed as property president and COO at City of Dreams Manila in November 2015 where he oversaw significant performance improvements.
Benning joined City of Dreams Manila in March 2016, and was in charge of all casino, marketing and advertising operations. He formerly was vice president of casino marketing for Resorts World Sentosa and executive director of marketing operations for Sands China Ltd.
The Bernstein team said, “For now we are giving these management changes the benefit of the doubt, but we would need to see improvement at CoD in 2018. CoD is now a turnaround story in our view (with a catalyst coming from Morpheus) as Q4 will confirm considerable problems, which in our view accelerated these management changes. CoD has underperformed other Melco properties since Hunterton took over in January 2017, especially in mass GGR and mass hold rate.
“While CoD Macau has underperformed in mass, both Studio City and Philippines continued to show reasonably good ramp-up.”
