“It certainly sounds like you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth if you’re firing 1,000 people in a service industry and you don’t think it’s going to affect any service levels.”
—Chad Beynon, gaming analyst, Macquarie Group Ltd., on MGM’s 2020 plan to create a more efficient company, in part through labor reductions
“It’s about making MGM a stronger, more nimble company, and it’s actually going to benefit our work in Japan.”
—Brian Sandoval, president of global gaming development, MGM Resorts, who says MGM’s 2020 program to streamline operations could help the company’s chances of landing one of three gaming licenses in Japan
“The VIP-room operations are still dominated by triads to date. But they have readjusted their traditional intrusive role and reinvented harmonious business strategies to suit the market reality.”
—T. Wing Lo and Sharon Kwok, authors of a 2016 paper that contended junkets in Macau “are the main drivers of economic profits for the triads,” or Chinese criminal gangs
“With Ratpac and Hollywood, Mariah, Israel, China, all of those things, I was like Icarus. I flew too close to the sun.”
—James Packer, on the depression that made him distance himself from Crown Resorts and sell one-fifth of the Australian company to Lawrence Ho
“There are a few tourists who come to Goa to play in the casinos. They are important from the tourism point of view. You cannot write them off. We need to do whatever activities are required to attract tourists to Goa.”
—Pramod Sawant, newly elected Goa chief minister, who apparently will not make good on years of promises by officials in the Indian state to relocate casinos on the Mandovi River
“The very large VIPs continue to travel but they don’t take as many risks as they have in the past.”
—Matt Bekier, CEO, Star Entertainment, on repercussions on the Aussie gaming industry of the continuing U.S.-China trade war
“Year after year, the commercial casino industry has reaffirmed its role as an economic powerhouse in the United States. More people than ever are experiencing the economic and social benefits of gaming in their communities, due in part to the expansion of legal sports betting across the country.”
—Bill Miller, president and chief executive officer of the American Gaming Association, upon the release of the “State of the States” the AGA Survey of the Commercial Casino Industry
“We have the only pairing of a major city and a major five-star luxury resort. There really isn’t another city, when you think about it, in the country that has this type of a five-star casino resort in a major city, outside of Las Vegas.”
— Joan Esneault, executive director of hotel sales and catering at Encore Boston Harbor, which will be opening June 23
“We may be the smallest tribe in the Valley, but we built the first high stakes bingo hall in the Phoenix area three decades ago. This exciting project will set a new standard for quality entertainment in the Northeast Valley while providing economic security to our tribal government.”
—Bernadine Burnette, president of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, on the occasion of the topping off ceremony for the We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort in Arizona
