Could provincial casinos compete with Manila?
Cristino Naguiat, chairman of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., says the regulator may open up the country’s gaming industry to new investors. PAGCOR is “open to giving out a casino license if it can help boost economic activity, and if the people in the area want it,” he said.
Investors will be required to make a minimum investment of $300 million to get into the market, a figure that may vary depending on the location, reported Bloomberg News. That’s far less than the $1 billion minimum investment required for investors in Manila’s Entertainment City, home of Bloomberry Resorts’ Solaire; Melco Crown’s City of Dreams; and Resorts World Manila, a Genting property. Japanese businessman Kazuo Okada’s Universal Entertainment is currently developing a $2 billion Vegas-style property, Manila Bay Resorts, within the 120-hectare (296-acre) complex.
PAGCOR runs 13 casinos in the country, including 10 outside Manila, according to Bloomberg. The publication reported that overall gaming revenues from government-run and privately-owned properties could reach 45 billion pesos and 90 billion pesos respectively in 2016, for a total of US$2.83 billion. That’s up 8 percent from a combined 125 billion pesos last year. And by 2025, total gaming revenues in the Southeast Asian country are expected to more than double this year’s estimate.
The regulator is “trying to replicate Entertainment City on a smaller scale. This will create competitors,” said Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist at BDO Unibank Inc. “Operators in Entertainment City will have to be on their toes, because if they are complacent, it’s not impossible that some of the traffic will go to these provincial casinos if the properties are world-class.”
Matt Hurst, executive vice-president for casino operations and marketing at Okada’s Tiger Resort, Leisure and Entertainment Inc., recently told the Hospitality Investment Conference that Resorts World Manila is looking far beyond the VIP segment to succeed in the Philippines.“We planned on doing a lot of junkets in the beginning, and we still have a lot of interest from the big players from Macau and junkets from Indonesia and Southeast Asia,” Hurst said. “The focus is in the mass and premium-mass markets.”
