No time frame for Phase II
Enrique Razon, chairman and chief executive of Bloomberry Resorts Corp., says the company will expand its Solaire Resort and Casino in Manila’s Entertainment City, but not until the time is right.
According to GGRAsia, Bloomberry posted consecutive quarterly losses for the first nine months of 2015, for a net loss in the period of PHP1.5 billion (US$31.4 million). During the same period in 2014, Bloomberry realized a profit of PHP3.3-billion. The company posted a 64 percent drop in share price for all of 2015, based on research from Morningstar Inc.
Razon said the financial results can be attributed to expenses incurred during the development of Solaire, a $1.2 billion property in Manila’s Entertainment City, which opened in March 2013. “Our quarterly performance doesn’t really reflect the top line. It’s the bottom line,” he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “We’re ramping up Phase 1A, and that means additional costs. Now we have to generate the revenues to cover all those costs, and the growth is providing that. So the problem is not the top line, it’s the bottom line. … Slowly, the losses are narrowing, quarter-on-quarter.”
Razon declined to give a timeline for the next phase of the expansion, but said it will happen “when the market size warrants it. So we really don’t know how much that will be. The market has to tell us what it wants and what it’s looking for.”
He also said that the property is attracting its share of Chinese gamblers, but is not relying solely on Asian high rollers to turn a profit. “Our relationship with China soured in 2011, so we never started off with China gamers because they could not come here. Some of them had visa issues.
“We focused on other high rollers,” Razon added. “We had Chinese coming from Macau, Hong Kong, and we developed a good market in Taiwan. We have a very good market in Malaysia, and then other countries followed.”
Cristino Naguiat, chairman of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., recently announced that GGR grew 17 percent year-on-year to PHP130 billion for 2015, according to the Asia Gaming Brief. But brokerage CLSA Ltd. noted that the Philippine gaming market, “a much more domestically focused sector” than other jurisdictions, could be hard-hit by a proposed PHP3,500 (US$73) casino entry fee proposed by some legislators.
