French Casino Firm Partouche Ends Japan IR Partnership

Another company might be backpedaling from plans to build a casino resort in Japan after Las Vegas Sands announced in May that it would no longer pursue expansion in the country and Wynn Resorts said this past Monday that it has decided to close its Yokohama office.

News emerged this week that French casino operator Groupe Partouche SA has ended its partnership with Hong Kong-listed investment firm Oshidori International Holdings Ltd. The two companies had teamed up to jointly pursue casino development opportunities in the Japanese prefecture of Nagasaki.

Partouche said in a Monday statement that it was still “attentive to the evolution of IR development projects and remains interested in having the opportunity to participate in one of them.” The company did not provide information why it has cut ties with Oshidori.

The French group was founded in 1973 and operates more than 42 casinos around France, Switzerland, Belgium, and Tunisia. Partouche and Oshidori announced their partnership early this year.

The Hong Kong-listed company said in its annual report for 2019 that it had participated in Nagasaki’s request-for-concept phase and has presented prefecture officials with an overall concept of its planned integrated resort with a casino. The concept included facility designs, marketing, and operation policies.

Nagasaki Delays Start of Request-for-proposal Process

News about the end of Partouche’s partnership with Oshidori emerge shortly after it became known that Nagasaki officials have been considering to push back the start of the prefecture’s request-for-proposal (RFP) process.

Nagasaki Governor Hodo Nakamura said late last month that a potential delay in the start of the RFP process could occur if Japan’s central government delayed the publication of the basic policy on integrated resorts.

It has now been confirmed that Japanese lawmakers would publish the basic IR framework in August or later as they need to add pandemic-related provisions in the face of the global Covid-19 crisis.

Japan legalized casino gambling in late 2016. However, that was only the first of a series of major hurdles that need to be cleared before the country can have Las Vegas- and Macau-style gaming facilities.

Japanese lawmakers plan to award up to three casino licenses. Under the country’s law, casino gambling can only be conducted at gaming floors that are part of larger integrated resorts. Japan’s government originally planned to open a license application window for interested cities/prefectures and their preferred private-sector casino partners to apply for casino licenses between January and July, 2021.

However, with the many delays and overall turbulences caused by the coronavirus pandemic, that timeline could now be moved.

Las Vegas casino powerhouse Wynn Resorts announced Monday that it is closing its Yokohama office saying that the coronavirus crisis “is having an unprecedented negative impact on integrated resort development, and resort companies such as Wynn are considering how to evolve our operations to align with a post-pandemic market.”

The company noted that it is still interested in expanding in the nascent Japanese market and will “monitor the situation closely.”

Las Vegas Sands, another major Las Vegas casino and hospitality company, announced in May that it would no longer pursue development opportunities in Japan, with CEO and Chairman Sheldon Adelson saying that the framework envisioned by the country’s government has made the company’s goals there “unreachable.”

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