Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JAPAN APR 2021 58 Ben Blaschke: 2020 has provided challenges that nobody in our industry saw coming. How do you feel Aristocrat has navigated these past 12 months? Lloyd Robson: 2020 was certainly a difficult year for everyone, but it was also a year that provided an opportunity to focus on the future. As always, we put our people first and implemented a series of initiatives to support their wellbeing. In fact, fromSeptember last year we have been providing Wellbeing Fridays, giving our employees some extra time at the end of the week to spend with family and friends. We know that the past year hasn’t been easy on our customers either, and so we’ve been focused on partnering and supporting them through initiatives such as our Aristocrat Assist and our Virtual Tradeshow Exhibition. Finally, we continued our investment in content development and in fact, we didn’t slow down during this period. We are confident that this investment and focus on leading content and hardware will help drive our customer success in 2022. There was no playbook on how to handle this disruption but we feel we have invested our time on the areas that matter; our people, our customers and our product. BB: How would you assess the outlook for 2021? LR: This is crystal ball time! There is no doubt 2021 in Asia is going to continue to be challenging. With so many markets reliant on tourism and with COVID cases still prevalent in a number of countries, 2021 will continue to be challenging in driving the foot traffic that casinos would ideally like to see. I believe gaming revenues will continue to be softer until border restrictions are eased and travel becomes an easier proposition than it is today. FEATURES