Hi everyone, Tim Pool here, editor of Gambling Insider. I'm with Pascal Camia, CEO of Monte Carlo Societe de Bens de Mer. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. Pascal, brilliant. Thank you for joining me.
How are you? Fine, fine. Thank you for hosting me. I wanted to ask you very generally to start off with, what's the latest with Casino de Monte Carlo and the company and what are the kind of things you're focusing on at the moment? So we focus on two different customer journeys.
It's what we did in 2022. And we're working on a new one. and we will strengthen this on 2023. Two customer journey is first of all the fun players or the occasional gamblers and on the other hand a much more tailor-made and personalized customer journey for high rollers in our private rooms. You recently announced a very positive sort of financial report I think it was for the for 2022 correct me if I'm wrong. In terms of those two focuses you talked about, how did that impact the results?
But can you give us a general overview of how those results went for the company anyway? Yes. Since now, nearly less than 10 years, we changed totally the vision of our customers. First, the Casino de Monte Carlo hosted mainly gamblers. 90% of the visitors were gamblers.
where gamblers and now we turn into much more entertainment occasion for visitors for being in our first rooms where they can enjoy a glass of champagne they can enjoy gastronomy because now the casino the land-based casino it's much more an entertaining place than it is still a gambling place but it's also this kind of product that our visitors are looking for. Yeah, I think that's a trend that's definitely, you can see across Europe and, of course, Las Vegas, gaming revenues versus maybe non-gaming entertainment revenues were a lot different in the past. And I think, yeah, that is a trend, as you say, that's growing.
On Europe, I see you've got the ECA badge there. I know you do a lot of work with the European Casino Association. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do with the association and how that's all going at the moment? Yeah.
First of all, in our land-based casino and also online, but our regulation so far doesn't allow us to go online in Monaco, people need to be very secure. And that's why with the European Casino Association, we will be certified as a responsible gambler. And also, in terms of anti-money laundering, and our GDPR, it's GDPR, sorry, I was talking French, is very important to secure the game in our casino. And with the European Casino Association, we fight against illegal gambling, mainly online.
And so in order to secure the game and to make sure that our customers will entertain really. Mm hmm. Now, I wanted to ask you about the the challenges that land based casinos face, because when we spoke here at this stand last year, I think the challenges then were a little bit more obvious because we had the pandemic and there wasn't so much of a land based presence actually at ice. In fact, here it's busy now this year, everyone everyone's back. But I guess with the with the pandemic, maybe not totally gone, but somewhat in the rearview mirror right now, what are the biggest challenges for casinos like Monte Carlo and land based casinos?
in general we have uh and i agree the pandemic uh nearly stopped but we have to face other issues the war between ukraine and russia which is very uh very important and sad but our russian market cannot go into our land base anymore so we have to reinvent ourselves and to find other markets in order to um to attract them for instance Americans, they went very strongly this summer being in our hotels but also gambling in our casinos so facing these issues the most important thing is attracting other markets, be present on the market. Because Asia is still blocked a little bit, Russia cannot come, so we have to... But fortunately with this pandemic, the European gamblers, the traditional European gamblers came back because usually they went... maybe further but then they discover Monte Carlo again and it's a very good thing.
It's interesting to hear that diversification is not necessarily just that maybe an online operator might have to think about that you guys that's something that's on your radar as well. well. My final question for you is given everything we've discussed we're at the start of 2023, what are your kind of plans and things that you're really focusing on as your kind of key themes for the rest of the year?
Well I was talking about the two different customer journey and which is very important is to give occasion for our gamblers to come to visit us. Either fan players or high rollers and to do this we create events but also we will build new concepts in our properties we will have a new daily Beach Club for maybe the young younger generation we will have French Riviera and Monegasque Riviera cuisine entertaining restaurants we will have Amazonico the famous brand present in London And Dubai, the fourth one will be in Monaco on the Casino Square this summer. And we reinvent also our Brasserie Café de Paris, one of our brands. So a lot of opportunity for our customers to come and see us. Yeah, plenty on the list there.
Best of luck with everything. And Pascal, thanks very much for your time. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.