Management reshuffle brings Andres from Manila
A Phase II development is in the planning for Melco Resorts & Entertainment’s Studio City property on Macau’s Cotai Strip.
Melco Chairman and CEO Lawrence Ho said in a statement that the global operator is looking to “augment the existing room inventory and entertainment offerings and contribute to the continued growth and development of this property.”
In 2017, Macau News reports, the company saw fourth-quarter net revenues rise 12 percent year-on-year to US$1.33 billion. “We expect another year of robust growth for Macau, as the market benefits from the improving demand environment, the anticipated completion of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, and the ongoing build-out of Cotai,” Ho recently stated.
The Macau government has granted a three-year extension on the development deadline for the public land concession where the Cotai casino resort stands. Melco’s annual report for 2016 said the deadline for completion of construction on the remaining land was July 24 of this year, reported GGRAsia. The new deadline is July 24, 2021.
According to CDC Gaming Reports, Melco is also looking to stem the tide of premium players defecting to other properties. A recent reshuffle of management personnel was linked to the loss of players under the prior team. In January, City of Dreams Property President Gabe Hunterton was replaced by Studio City Property President David Sisk. Former City of Dreams Manila President Geoff Andres returned to Macau to take over Studio City. Kevin Benning, former vice president of gaming operations at City of Dream Manila, was named senior vice president and chief operating officer at City of Dreams Manila, stepping into Andres’s former role.
“At the end of the day, our decline in our mass hold rate and our mass GGR was really a function of some of our top players trying other properties,” Ho explained. “We recognized that at City of Dreams, our flagship property, in terms of our really core business which is mass and premium mass, we weren’t keeping pace with the market and ultimately we benchmark ourselves at the highest level of that segment.
“What I had then identified previously was that there was a leadership issue and the fact of it is, as senior leaders of the company, we need to get the best of out of our people and have all of our teams work together in unison,” he said.
Sisk said reclaiming premium players is his first priority at City of Dreams. “Obviously, they’re going to go out and they’re going to sample, whether it’s Wynn Palace or MGM or the other properties out there, and we have done not so good a job of getting them back.”
