MGM boss Grant Bowie sees 2016 as a game changer

MGM Macau boss Grant Bowie has described 2016 as among the most important in Macau’s history, pointing to the coming year as a unique opportunity for the six gaming concessionaires to take advantage of the shifting nature of the market.

While much of the focus on Macau over the past 18 months has been negative due to the significant fall in gross gaming revenue, Bowie takes a very different stance in a wide ranging interview in the upcoming January/February 2016 issue of WGM.

But he insists it is vital that the concessionaires and other stakeholders recognize the changing market and customer base as an opportunity and work together to take advantage.

“It’s a really interesting position we’re in and Macau should be taking advantage of it,” Bowie tells WGM. “Because we’re small we should be flexible and we should be dynamic but we’re spending too much time second guessing each other rather than collaborating and realizing that this change in market conditions is the best thing that could have happened to Macau.

“It’s going to create the greatest opportunity we’re ever going to have to actually be able to respond to the changing nature of the Chinese consumer and therefore be price setters rather than just order takers.

“There seems to be a sense of misunderstanding or a lack of appreciation that our competitors are outside Macau, not inside Macau. We’ve got to get our head around that. We are all having to learn what collaboration is all about and that it is not just about the gaming concessionaires, it’s about all the principal stakeholders. That means the government, the business community and the residential community. We’re all in this game together.”

Rather than long for a return of the “golden days”, when GGR was rocketing skywards, Bowie said the incredible growth Macau had enjoyed for so long was simply not sustainable in the long term.

“The positive/negative we have is that we are still the largest gaming destination in the world, but had we kept going with the sort of growth rates we had experienced I’m not sure we would have been sustainable over time,” he said. “I think we would have become so gaming-centric and so mono-dimensional in terms of narrowing the customer segmentation that we would have got to the point where we were incapable of diversifying.”

MGM’s second Macau property, MGM Cotai, is due to open in late 2016.