Wynn also confident of success
Forget that his company hasn’t won a Japan casino license yet, or that the bidding likely won’t begin until 2018 or even later. MGM Resorts International CEO Jim Murren says the U.S.-based gaming giant will be part of a deal to develop an integrated resort in Japan by the year 2025. Murren has pegged the cost of the IR at about $10 billion and the development timeline at about five years, starting in 2020.
Murren’s confidence may stem from the company’s strong commitment to Japanese partners. That stance should play well before the lawmakers and committee members who award the licenses, probably sometime in 2019.
“We commit to being a good partner to Japanese companies in a Japanese-led integrated resort consortium,” Murren said at the recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2017 Japan Conference. He touted MGM’s “proven track record of being a trusted, dependable partner” in foreign markets, and said he likes Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka as possible locations. MGM just opened an office in Tokyo. And Murren said he continues to learn about Japanese culture and traditions and hopes to develop a “relationship of trust” with the Japanese business community.
The Japanese parliament, or Diet, is expected to complete the implementation bill, part two of the country’s gaming legislation, by the end of the year. In recent weeks, speculation that lawmakers will create an overly strict regulatory environment, possibly hampering profitability, has made some potential investors pull back. Sheldon Adelson, for one, chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., has said that proposed regulations that would limit casino size would not allow “the best kind of IR” in Japan, Asia Gaming Brief reports. He warned restrictions could limit investment in a single IR to US$5 billion or less, rather than the US$10 billion he initially pledged. Murren still thinks $10 billion is a reasonable figure for an integrated resort development in a major metropolitan city.
Gaming industry executives are also concerned about the possibility of casino entry taxes, which could be imposed on Japanese and other restrictions on casino visits, reported Forbes.
Meanwhile, it’s assumed that the government will require foreign companies to partner with local Japanese companies, reported Casino.org.
Asked if he plans to get in on the bidding, Wynn Resorts chief Steve Wynn recently told the Nikkei Asian Review, “Yes. Japan is one of the most sophisticated countries in the world, a fascinating country with an ancient tradition and culture. That has made Japan one of the great tourist destinations in the world.
“My company is in a special business—not the casino business,” Wynn said. “My company is dedicated to building destination resorts. And incidentally, because there is a casino room in the building, then we can make the destination resort more powerful, more beautiful and on a much bigger scale. That’s what the casino does.”
But, he added, “In order to recruit staff, train staff, have access to supplies that are associated with resorts of the highest quality, you must be in a city, in a country, that can support such a place. Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama are such places.”
It’s widely believed that Japan will restrict casino floors to 15,000 square meters (about 161,458 square feet); tax mass market gaming at 22 percent; tax VIP play at 12 percent; and set the gambling age at 20.
Small cities may face an uphill battle to bag one of the licenses, but the Asia Gaming Brief reports that “at least 10” major resort operators are interested in the city of Tomakomai. AGB cited a report in the Tomakomai Minpo newspaper that identified the interested parties as executives of Caesars Entertainment, Galaxy Entertainment, Hard Rock International, and the Clairvest Group of Canada.
