Overseas players visiting Macau casinos do not like to enter rooms specially designated for themselves, even though such a Macau government scheme offers casino operators the possibility of a low tax on their gross game income (GGR). That is the view of the president of MGM Resorts International, the parent company of the Macau operator, MGM China Holdings Ltd.
Bill Hornbuckle, chief executive and president of MGM Resorts, said he “hated” foreign customers, or those outside of China, to be discriminated against. He spoke at the JPMorgan Games, Accommodation, Restaurants & Leisure Access Forum in the United States on Thursday.
MGM China operates casino resorts MGM Macau and MGM Kotai (pictured) in the heart of Chinese gambling.
Mr Hornbuckle’s comments came in the context of discussions about the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in game chips to monitor the financial integrity of games.
Typically, these RFID know-how are used to verify and monitor the use, location, and value of casino chips used in table games.
MGM China has been recorded using RFID in table games since 2016 during previous Macao gaming licensing periods.
Mr Hornbuckle said in his recent commentary that a key advantage of RFID is that it can connect game chips to individual players, and therefore wants to expand relative to the traditional tourism market in Greater China, a part the Macau government wants to see: mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
He said at an investor forum on Thursday: “We introduced a ‘chip-in-chip’ program a few years ago where basically all [game] chips are tracked.
“The advantage of that at the time was no error in the game,” he said, adding that the casino brand knew exactly where to put our workforce.
The MGM Resorts CEO also commented, “There were a lot of backend benefits in terms of accounting, finance, etc.”
He also said now, “The market is asking for international business outside of Greater China, which means Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
“The only way to track it effectively was to put it in a private room [in a casino] because it was a different tax category. That meant everyone from places like Thailand would go to a small room over there and gamble.”
Under the plan, which provides a separate gaming zone for overseas players, casino concessioners in Macau will be required to submit the paperwork they need to qualify for an exemption of up to 5 percentage points of a 40% government levy on the GGR.
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