It's now my pleasure to hand our program over to Steve Cooney, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you and good afternoon. Joining the call on behalf of the company today are Steve Wynn, Matt Maddox, Kim Sinatra and myself here in Las Vegas. Also on the phone are the operational management team for both our Las Vegas and Macau properties. Before we get started, I just wanted to remind everyone that we'll be making forward looking statements under Safe Harbor Federal Securities Law and those statements may or may not come true. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Mr.
Winn.
I think the numbers speak for themselves. General comment covering both Las Vegas and Macau as this. We don't see any major change or new development in Macau concerning our existing operations other than all of the comments we've made in the past about the confusion, the ambiguity about what we face in terms of tables in the upcoming months as we were about 170 days before the opening of the Palace, which is the most significant event in the company's near future. And based upon what's happened to Galaxy and what we expect to happen at the Studio City, which is just today found out how many tables they're going to have in the last 2 days, a few weeks before they're open. The confusion and the rather mystical policies are governing the assignment of equipment in these new hotels, which are tremendous diversifications away from pure gaming into all other forms of non gaming, the confusion about the tables and the government's position in this regard has made it very difficult to plan for employees and other aspects of the facility.
I mentioned this early in the conversation because it's become a major issue in Macau as to the impact of government policy on planning for employment, promotions, hiring and compensation. None of us are really clear on what our environment is going to be like going forward and it makes planning and adjusting almost a mystical process. And this is the I think probably the major topic of conversation in executive conference rooms as people try and resolve their planning on human resources in the Macau market. Our construction of our hotel in Macau is on schedule. We're scheduled for March 25 opening.
And the results of the last quarter were consistent with the things we've seen in previous quarters, and that is almost approximately half the business of VIP is gone and maybe shrinking. It's caused us to review our credit policies and our attitudes towards junket operators and some of them have gone out of business and I think others will indeed go out of business, which means you have to focus very intensely on the policies that you employ with regard to the credit mass business is sort of flat, and I think that's a general description of it. And that explains the earnings in Macau. Now in Las Vegas, we are in this market, the principal beneficiary of international business and we have been since we opened in 2,005. So, if a segment of the international market is impacted for extraneous reasons or external reasons, like a change in government policy or whatever in China, then we would be the principal victims or we would suffer the most.
And that's exactly what happened. Any change in our earnings in Las Vegas is strictly a reflection of a drop in Asian baccarat business. The rest of the segments in our Las Vegas business are pretty good. Room revenue and stuff like that is healthy. Our convention business is healthy.
Our food and beverage business is healthy. And we're very satisfied with Las Vegas. And if anything, the problems in China are causing us to refocus our energies here in America even more intensely. We're happy that we're moving forward in Massachusetts in spite of the friction created by the Mayor and the administration in Boston, which for some reason is unwilling to accept the decision of the Casino Control Commission gracefully and keeps trying to use various tactics to say that we are in Boston, not in Everett. It may sound laughable at this point and in a perverse way it is a comedy, but it did cause us delays, but happily they're pretty much behind us now and we're underway with remediation and we're looking forward to groundbreaking in a few months.
And the Massachusetts project, which we think is a very exciting thing, will be on its way and hopefully open in 2018. I'll leave the rest of any general remarks before we take questions to Matt or Ian or Gamal or Steve or Maurice or anybody on the call who would like to or alter what I've just said. And there are people on this call that have a tighter feeling. I've been very much involved with design in the last several months. So, if any of the operating executives want to close in on this, please feel free to do so.
Kamal, do you have anything to add, Ian? Either one
of you?
Steve, you have articulated it very well.
It's still a guessing game when it comes to the number of tables and the number of employees, the quotas for the employees and there is a reluctance. If there are any good news, which have been rumored, they're just that and there is a reluctance actually come out and indicate to the companies that are working here that they are deliberately easing some of the restrictions they've been placing on us. So we're hoping for the best and we hope we'll be treated fairly. But as you say, the property is looking great and our opening date is March 25 and we're very hopeful.
The question is, will we will our property be overwhelming enough to kick that market into a different place? It's hard to say, I have no idea how many tables we're going to have. The notion that a person who spent $2,500,000,000 I'm talking about Melco now, would not know how many tables they're going to have 3 weeks before they open is so preposterous that it's worthy of comment. And how in the world do we underwrite the job security of the local workforce in Macau, I'm at a loss to answer that question. And as we go forward in the planning of Wynn Palace, we are hopeful that we'll be able to press the issue and get a stronger, stronger, more clarity, stronger and more and much more clarity from the leadership of the local government.
I think we should open it up for questions.
Our first question comes from Stephen Kim with Goldman Sachs. Steven, your line is open.
This is actually Rebecca Stone from Stephen Kent's team on for Steve. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about Las Vegas. I did notice that food and beverage is doing well. You spoke, Steve, to some of these things doing better to maybe offset some of the lack of international business. Is this something that you would be looking to adjust further in Las Vegas to appeal to more of these types of customers?
Thank you.
Well, yes, ma'am. We've done a whole bunch of things to offer. We always adjust. I mean, we're professionals. I would describe this as such and we run the business in uptimes and downtimes and we adjust for the situations.
We made a whole bunch of changes in the casino, both physically and procedurally. We've even fooled with the rules of the game. It's been 50 years since Las Vegas increased the price of gaming. We're way overdue considering the cost of running games and payroll. We've adjusted our yield rate management approach.
Maurice Wooden is here and he's very good at that in the whole American operation. We made a host of adjustments. We were off in 1 month by from $100,000,000 in Baccarat to $45,000,000 We're off $55,000,000 in Baccarat, but we made almost the same amount of money because of all the adjustments we made. And they go across the board throughout the hotel and the way we price the hotel, the restaurants and entertainment and gaming. We don't sit by and allow ourselves to become victims of anything, of any aspect of our operation over which we have any control.
And so in my long term view of our operations in America and in China is still positive. It's the short term that's bewildering. And it's bewildering enough to complain about it. But as far as adjusting here and in China, it's a constant process. I was in China last week and I kept my people up until 2 in the morning on the subject of VIP.
And then we reconvened at 8 am again and went for another 6 hours. I think altogether we spent 15 hours in the most intense kind of consultation with every smart person we had that dealt with these subjects. So adjusting is what we do. And I mean, the description of those detailed description of those adjustments could go on for a half hour. But know that we are doing it and we're doing it successfully.
Our next question comes from Joe Greff with JPMorgan.
Good afternoon, everybody. Earlier this month, it was reported in the local Macau media that the Director of the Liaison Office between Macau and Mainland China, that the central government is going to help support Macau's economy. And these comments followed similar statements from Macau's Chief Executive last month. I think no real specifics were given. So my question to you, Steve, is this, how do you interpret these comments?
What specific measures can or will be introduced based on your dealings with both sets of government officials? Or do you think these statements were more generic and or meant to send a signal to Mainland Chinese, who maybe, for the lack of better word, nervous about going to Macau? And then I have a follow-up.
Who knows? I mean, these facilities are enormously diversified non gaming buildings, but they depend on their survival. Their payroll, their operational viability depends on the gaming equipment that was always part of the whole construct. Here in America, we would never have a Las Vegas of the diversity we've had if the city had told us how many tables we could spread. The table cap is the single most counterintuitive and irrational decision that was ever made.
Here we are spending 1,000,000,000 of dollars creating non gaming facilities And then, arbitrarily, someone says, well, you should only have this many tables. No jurisdiction ever has imposed such that kind of logic on us. And what it's done, it's turned our human resource planning inside out and upside down. And you can tell by the tone of my voice, the extent of my frustration on this point. My frustration on behalf of our colleagues at Melco, who made commitments for 400 tables.
Why on earth they have to deal with half as many is beyond my anything that I can understand in the 45 years of experience I've had. It isn't good for Macau. It's not good for the citizens of Macau. It's not good for the tens of thousands of employees of Macau who are looking forward to promotions and raises and all kinds of benefits that accrue because of the viability of these resorts. We built tens of thousands of rooms and restaurants and attractions, But we say you're not allowed to gamble because you can't have the tables.
Well, that's one of the reasons they come to Macau. If you wanted to undermine and scuttle the viability of that industry, you'd put in table caps. And you could tell I'm a tremendous critic of that decision because I don't understand it in terms of anything in my 45 years of experience that explains it. And to see the predicament that the Melco people find themselves in, because they make covenant agreements is dazzling to me. And I've complained to the government about this and tried to understand what the rationale was for this desire that you mentioned, statements by the central government or by the local government to support this industry and mainly support the people that work in that industry that are the whole interior, all of the young people and the families of Macau that have become part of the hospitality industry.
A huge amount of them are people that are related directly or indirectly to junket operators are the beginning of it because they employed all kinds of people from Macau. But forgetting the junket operators, what about the rank and file dealers in the mass casino that cater to the tourists? What happens to their jobs? What happens to their promotions? I don't know whether the local government has been intimidated by the unions because or something, but the unions are going to end up acting up about this subject before it's over.
And we as operators are going to have to stand there on the sidelines bewildered at the position that the industry finds itself in. In my 45 years of experience, I've never seen anything like this before. And hopefully, hopefully, the leadership of the community will intervene and correct this aberration that threatens the employment security of the citizens of Macau. And thereby also relieving the predicaments that people like the Lloyd family of Galaxy experienced with the 1,000,000,000 of dollars they spent and Lawrence Ho and Jamie Packer's company Melco. But these are problems that when you say that there's been the government has made general statements about supporting us or supporting the people of Macau, I think it's time for them to put their actions where the rhetoric is.
But the rhetoric won't solve the problem.
Great. And then I have a second question. When do you start to migrate employees from your current Macau operations to Cotai? How many employees do you see shifting in this quarter? How many in the 1Q?
And I guess overall how much fixed OpEx shifting is there going from the Peninsula to Cotai? And that's all for me. Thank you.
Ian and Gamal, who deal with it.
We have approximately 2,000 people. That all depends on people that want to transfer from Wynn Macau to Wynn Palace. But quite honestly, we will be able to tell more once we know how many tables we're going to As you said earlier, the tremendous amount of ambiguity and there is no clarity as to how many and the timing is going to be about the Q1, so we can get them acclimated to the new property. But we don't have an exact number. We have a range that we know the number of employees that have requested a transfer, which would be outstanding for Wynn Palace get that culture transferred.
But the exact number we will know as soon as we know how many tables we'll get at Wynn Palace.
Kamal, I'm interrupt you for a minute. I mentioned earlier that the people at Studio City found out a few weeks before opening what the story is about their tables. Now, Macau was proud of the 5 star status, the legitimate 5 star status of Win Macau. It was hard to train people to get to that level of service, but it's been a source of pride for the community and for the employees themselves. We cannot train people and maintain service levels in the non casino and casino areas when we don't have the time to train our people.
So the notion of finding out how many tables you're going to get 3 weeks before your opening is outrageous and ridiculous. Ridiculous is the word for it. We've never operated a business this way. We train people. That's how we give them a future.
By training them, that contributes to their promotions, their pride and to the guest experience. And at the end of the day, guest experience is the only controlling factor in the survival of the hospitality industry. Go ahead, Ian. The question that they want you to deal with is, how much of the expense load you're carrying at Wynn on the Peninsula that would be relieved as people that we're carrying on your payroll were heavy in our payroll on the Peninsula Hotel deliberately as part of our training routine to maintain the high level of service that Wynn enjoys in our reputation in Macau. So Ian, what I think his question is, how much how far will your expense load drop if you were to get the tables you were supposed to get, which was 500 when we started the building, confirmed by the government.
Steve, based on current business trends, there is a significant opportunity to migrate people to Wynn Palace trained, highly qualified people and not necessarily need to backfill those people at Wynn Macau until business levels pick back up in the city. So for the immediate outlook, there's a significant opportunity to transfer people over and it would be a significant savings on payroll for Macau without any fall off in service quality.
Understanding to complete that answer that the people that we transfer that we don't have to replace in no way makes up the entire workforce at Palace. There is tremendous amount of additional hiring that has to take place in order for that enterprise to exist. Does that answer your circumstance.
Our next question comes from Carlo Santarelli with Deutsche Bank.
My question. I have two questions. For starters, maybe Kamal or Ian, if you guys could comment a little bit on what you're seeing within the mass business today. Obviously, the slots were a little bit weaker, but the mass table seemed to have held up fairly well from a drop perspective a sequential basis. So the question is, are you guys starting to see any stability or feel any comfort in at least that portion of the Macau business?
And then a bigger picture question maybe for Steve. Steve, as you think about some of the government's conversation and some of maybe the comments that have been made over time about economy of Macau. In your opinion longer term, do you get the sense that Macau has the potential to really transform itself away from being a predominantly gaming market much in the way that Las Vegas did over a number of years?
Well, I'll take my part first. Absolutely, Las Vegas and Macau rather has transformed itself, not shall or can or will, it has been transformed by the projects that have been built in direct response to the leadership and the suggestions made by the local government. Everything from promotions to the creation of facilities, exactly that has already taken place. But understand that the reason that these extraordinary non gaming attractions exist is because the damn casino is the cash register. That's what drives Las Vegas, 40 odd percent of my hotels, the ones that you guys know that we built with this organization in the past.
None of them have ever had even half of the revenue be gaming, over half was non gaming, but none of them could have been built or would exist today if anybody had given us a table cap because the people that stay in the rooms want to go downstairs and play sometimes Besides eating and entertaining and shopping and going to the spa, they want to play or they wouldn't come to Macau. So we support these extravagant non gaming diversifications with the casino. That's the truth of it. That's the irrevocable, undeniable, inexorable truth of it. The gaming allows the non gaming to flourish.
And that's the lesson we're trying to get to penetrate the leadership of Macau, that the very thing they want requires that they let us run our business based upon our experience, our long experience everywhere else. And that's where the heart of the frustration is, that somehow we haven't been able to get that truth really accepted. And I'm hopeful that before we have demonstrations or real angst or I had an employee approach me when I was in Macau and say, Mr. Winn, is the government angry at the union and trying to cut back on gaming employees? I said, well, I don't have any reason to think that, but that's the kind of stuff that's going around in the staff dining room.
This confusion is not isolated to management. It's now spread to the employees, very unhealthy situation, both socially and politically. And when I'm asked questions like that, I don't have a clear answer. And I want to get away from this kind of thing before it gets out of hand. Now, Ian, you can ask the rest of it.
The mass gaming, I'm in a position to answer that question. Mass table revenue is flat as against a year ago. Against a quarter ago, a quarter ago. Not a year ago, a quarter ago sequentially.
It is flat, Steve, but we've obviously had a considerable fall off year over year in the very high end of mass, which is very similar to low end VIP. So those players have evaporated or returning less. So we've actually driven more business in the mid tier. And as we've taken tables back from the junket operators, we have an additional 23 tables in mass over the same time last year. We've managed to drive more business in mid mass.
Ian, I appreciate that.
That's great. And just a follow-up on that, Ian. So you are in a sense, I guess what you're saying is, is some of the VIP players that trickle down into the high end mass, are you not seeing as much of them and hence you're fishing in different pools than you otherwise
would have historically?
Yes, correct. And we're allowed to do that because we've got more tables that we've migrated to mass. And right now we're giving approximately 58% of our room inventory to mass, that's stable games and slots. So what we've been losing out on junkets, we've been trying to drive into mass.
All the more reason why you need more mass tables, so that people amuse themselves. That plays in when you have lower level of gaming, amusement gaming, you need more tables to deal to those people. That's the only hope that you have for compensating the loss of VIP. Now at Wynn, we were able to transfer, as he just said, a couple dozen tables. But in Cotai with these big hotels and their massive footage that's dedicated to non casino, you need tables to do that.
You can't do it with 150 or 250 tables. You need 400 or 500 tables to do it effectively and to support the workforce. Otherwise, the workforce gets cut back and you have layoffs and all these things that have never happened in my career, in 45 years, I've never had a layoff. I think we once dropped 100 people in company. 45 years, we don't do layoffs.
People come to work for us, they get job security. And I've never broken a promise about job security in my employees in my entire career. And I don't like facing that possibility one bit.
Understood. Thank you, everyone.
Our next question comes from Robin Farley with UBS. Robin, your line is open.
Robin, are you there? Well, we miss you.
Okay. Our next question comes from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America.
Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Steve, you mentioned a little bit earlier in the call here just that you had done a bit of a deep dive with your staff in Macau regarding the VIP business. And one of the other headlines that sort of kind of did the rounds in September was around the dorejunket business that was operating out of Wynn Macau and some other casinos as well. I was curious just for the team's view on whether or not you thought those issues were fairly isolated and already kind of dealt with or if there's going to be any continued fallout from those or other similar types of issues going forward?
Good question. It didn't have anything to do with us. It had to do with one of their people in their financing syndicate. The way these guys operate is that they get people to invest almost like a mutual fund or a hedge fund. And then they give these people a return each month on the financial support that they get from these groups of lenders.
And apparently, one of the employees who was interfacing with the lenders absconded with their money. It had nothing to do with us. And we went to 100% cash with dore. They had all the liquidity they needed right in the cage. And when we found out about it, we terminated any extension for as much as 1 RMB or 1 Hong Kong dollar to dore and they were able to cover it because they had the liquidity that allowed them to do it.
Whether someone else is going to there's going to be another defalcation or embezzlement is hard to predict. Criminals tend to be surreptitious until it comes to light. But I think all the junket operators took that as a signal to tighten up on their internal controls from what I'm told. So, I don't suspect that that will happen in the manner that it happened to dore again. But the overall viability of the junkets themselves depends upon the liquidity and the wealth and the retained earnings that they've kept.
We don't see their numbers. And so we're very conservative in how we deal with them. We don't know their retained earnings. Some of them have gone public, but the information that you study under those circumstances is at best described by the word murky. So we're left to manage our end of this transaction, which is to shorten the string and the length of time that we give these people, how many non redeemable chips we give them.
And the amount of outstanding unredeemed chips has dropped dramatically almost by half, which reflects the level of business almost identically. Is that that's about as deep an answer I can give you as a satisfactory.
No, that's great. Thank you very much. And then my other question, I think you're really clear about some of your views as to how the people and employees are impacted at some of your facilities going forward by some of the policies out there. We've heard from some people in the market that potentially the Macau government may also be looking to add potential restrictions around the blue card policy, which I think is some of the immigrant labor that they allow into the market. I was curious if that was at all impacting your view either towards staffing levels in Cotai or if it was really just isolated to more of the table counts and your ability to kind of plan ahead?
At the present time, unemployment in Macau is almost 0. The government wanted us to build highly diversified non gaming structures. We went and did it for $10,000,000,000 or more, and if you count all of us, the largest being us at $4,000,000,000 How in the hell can you run those places without employees? I mean, what are we supposed to do? Shut down a floor?
Close a restaurant? Curtain the very thing that they told us that they wanted to see happen? Without employees, it's so ludicrous that it defies rational conversation. Some of these places are going to close locally, creating unemployment. We can absorb them, I think, in the industry, but still the extent of the new operations are so comprehensive that in order to operate them appropriately, you still need more people to work.
And the spectacle of these buildings being unattended is beyond imagination and will have dire consequences in the community on a couple of levels. The first level will be that it will negatively impact the job security of the local Macau citizens and undoubtedly result in rather severe complaining. What form that will take, I'm not sure. The second thing is that the hospitality profile of the city will be severely compromised and that will take years to recover, years. You only get one chance to make a good impression and if you bogey that impression, if you blow it, it's a long time to fix it and maybe never.
What is important is that the Macau market as it's viewed by the world never loses its viability, because the day that it loses its viability, it will lose its long term longevity and the entire thing gets really damaged severely. And that will impact the community of Macau in a very negative way. And that's one of the things that concerns me a lot, because employee attitudes, everybody in the world, including all of us on this call today, it has been established that our present state of mind, our happiness, our sense of security is fundamentally a function of how we view tomorrow or the future. You tell someone that's feeling poorly, suffering from an ailment or some discomfort that they're going to be better in 3 days and they feel better today. You tell someone who's feeling great today that they're going to be awfully sick next week and they get depressed today.
So the attitude of the employees, their sense of security, safety, their notion of a positive future for themselves and their families is a critical management responsibility. Now, to a certain extent, we control that within the walls of our buildings. But every once in a while, depending on public policy, we lose control of that because of factors that are outside of our control. And my feeling is that Macau at the moment is on the edge of that moment, which should be avoided at all
cost.
And our next question comes from Harry Curtis with Nomura.
Hi, Steve, and thank you for being refreshingly frank here. I wanted to just go back to the meeting that you had with your employees on the VIP topic. What I'm trying to get a better sense of is, was there any conclusion that you all came to about what the intent of the policy changes related to the junkets really has been on the part of Beijing? Well,
that's a good question. And from what we understand, reading the South China Morning Post and other source of information available to us, President Xi discovered that the people of China felt that government officials were corrupt and feathering their own nest. And he thought that was very malignant for the health of his party and the future of his country and made a decision to correct that and have a campaign against corruption. And considering the amount of people, if you read if you believe the newspapers that have been charged with misconduct of one degree or another, President Xi did the right thing for the right reasons. And because of the way China Mainland China works, every businessman in that country dealt in one way or another with a government official because the government controlled so many aspects of public policy and business interface.
So businessmen who had nothing to hide, as well as those who might have had something to hide, all went into the foxholes or into a defensive posture, because they didn't know if the next shoe was going to drop or what the next thing was going to happen. And it has caused across the board a contraction of all VIP consumer spending at the higher level, which includes Macau. And that explains the problem that the junket operators are having, plus the restriction on the credit cards and things like that. So in one respect, the junket operators faced a problem that was part of an intelligent central government policy. No argument about that.
Corruption is a bad thing and President Xi did the right thing, just as I would in my company if I thought there was corruption to that extent. Fernando Choi, the head of the government of Macau or President Xi Jinping or President of a public company or a private company for that matter, it is bad business to have corruption and it should be stopped because it's unhealthy and goes to the root of the viability of any organization or institution. So there is something that in our meetings we acknowledged and we accept as inconvenient perhaps in terms of a chunk of operators, but not necessarily a bad thing. So we adjust to it. And that was the way we dealt with that in our conversations.
Alternatively, the reason those conversations took 15 or 16 hours is because we're juggling the reassessment of our facilities and adjustments to our facilities to cater to the new reality that we face, which incidentally is much more like Las Vegas than what Macau was in the past. And that's fine with me. I have no argument with it. But in the process of adjusting, how do we run our facility under the new reality? And we can do that.
But we need tables in the casino to support the restaurants and the convention and meeting space and the entertainment. Of the $4,000,000,000 the casino represents perhaps $400,000,000 of it. The other $3,600,000,000 went into other things that weren't part of the old way of looking at things. So on one hand, we understand what went on with the campaign against corruption and we have no issue with that or the thinking that went into it. What we have an issue with is the leadership that we need to have in the government to help us make the transition to the new reality.
Can I ask just a quick follow-up on your comments? You've mentioned a restriction on credit cards. I'm guessing it's on the union pay cards. Yes. And can you give us a sense of has that been implemented and if it hasn't, any expectations on how it might change customer behavior?
Well, we weren't in the union pay card business to the extent of other people. So it didn't mean that much to us.
And Harry, you should just look at the mass revenues and see how they're doing. I think that enforcing the rules around Union Pay are overplayed in the media.
Way overpaid. Way overplayed.
All right. I'll leave it to others. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Thomas Allen with Morgan
Stanley. This is Mark Savino on for Thomas. Just a quick question back on Vegas. Wondering if you could maybe give just a bit more detail as to what you're actually seeing in the high end baccarat business. Maybe if you could parse out visitation versus spend for visit trends among those high end players?
And then really, if you guys have any sense as to how close you might be to a bottom there? Thank you.
Maurice, you ought to deal with that.
Well, we're continuing to see year over year where you have a reduction in that high end play on the international side. And again, it's like Steve said, we're adjusting to adhere to make sure that we look at all other areas to make sure that we're recovering whatever that loss might be. We really don't understand what that bottom might be. I mean, we certainly have still a good flow of international business, but it wasn't like 2014 or 2013.
And we're mainly talking on the gaming side and it's not just Asia, Latin America with everything that's going on there in Brazil and other places, clearly that's down as well. So our high end business was down by about half from a revenue side compared to this time last year.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Kenneth Fong with Credit Suisse.
Frustration in this operation uncertainty and ambiguity on table allocation as well. So on 3rd quarter, could I say to say that the direct VIP actually hold low that actually hurt the margin? If so, what is approximately the EBITDA impact this? And the second question is this operation uncertainty on table allocation, will it affect your decision in the development of Wind Diamond? Thanks.
I'll take the first one. It's Matt. So as you see that table mass was up, but that EBITDA increase was offset by you're exactly right, direct VIP was down and our slots were down. So those 2 offset the increase in table mass. Yes.
The whole percentage was fairly was normal in direct VIP. It was the volumes.
And about Wind Diamond, do you want about Yes.
Wind Diamond, would this uncertainty over table allocation effect?
The government told us that we could continue to develop our land concession so long as it was Phase 2, which is it's always been. And we have designed a remarkable Phase 2. But until we understand about Wynn Palace, It's our ability to look into the future and plan financially is again compromised at the moment. My long term confidence in Macau is still strong. I love the position we're in, in terms of being part of that community.
The issue here has to do with short term adjustments, not long term confidence. At the end of the day, I'm in the same position as the Head of the Macau government and for that matter, President Xi Jinping. My job is to create a stable environment in terms of human resources, job security and a better future for people. Isn't that after all what governments are doing or hopefully doing? And I say at the 11th hour, the government does the right thing and supports the health of its citizens as businessmen will support the health of their employees.
Because the ultimate truth is that the only thing that matters is the happiness of the people, whether they're employees or citizens of a community. And they're the ones that touch the public because only people make people happy. Only people make happy communities. Only people make successful companies. And the job of leaders are to do everything and anything in their power to create a happy and positive outlook to the future for their constituencies.
And I strongly believe that when the dust settles, leaders of companies and governments do the right thing. And that's the basis for my long term confidence in the market and my long term confidence in the leadership of the government. We all come to the same conclusion when we've had enough time to see. Hopefully, we come to the right conclusion before we avoid catastrophic, unpleasant or disruptive alternatives. We anticipate certain results and don't let them occur.
So whether you're a CEO of a company or you're the head of a government, you have to have a little bit of an ability to look around the corner and see what's coming ahead of you. And if that's not good, turn away from it. Amend your policies, learn from experience and come to a more sound conclusion. That's what I hope for businessmen and I hope for ourselves and for that matter for the government.
Great. Thank you. That's all for me.
Our final question comes from David Katz.
Hi, afternoon all. If we look at the forthcoming new property in Cotai and presume frankly that it will be relatively the most desirable in the market as is typical. And is an attraction can you talk about the strategies in a way about identifying presumably somewhat of a new customer mix and how you're thinking about identifying and engaging and hiring that customer mix as the property?
There's no mystery as to who those customers are. There are people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China want to live life in an exciting way for a day or 2 or 3 on vacation. They want to be served well, stay in lovely hotels, eat in good restaurants, enjoy entertainment and attractions that they can't get at home and while they're there, play in a casino, which is exciting and have fun. Their experience is under the control of the staff that serves them, as well as the environment in which this all takes place. That's the story in Las Vegas, that's the story in Boston, That's the story in Macau.
It's the story in Manila. It's the story in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nothing changes, nor will it ever be different than that. Those are the truths of the hospitality industry and any of its variations or iterations, including Macau or any other city on earth. We build buildings.
Yes, I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, no, I'm sorry. I wanted to just maybe reiterate the question in a far more candid way. Do you expect this market to become more competitive, more aggressively competitive? And how do you think about whether or not to engage in that?
It's already competitive. It has been competitive for quite some time. Look at Las Vegas with the dozens of hotels, the thousands of tables, the tens of thousands, 150,000 rooms, millions upon millions feet of convention and meeting space, theaters, cabarets, public entertainment, volcanoes that erupt, fountains that dance, pirate ships that sink, trees that come out of the floor, gondolas that go across dancing fountains for $100,000,000 All of this is a fight for the audience that's here. Discounts given at the tables, complementaries, it's so intensely competitive in Macau and has been for some long time, for a long time that it will continue in the same fashion that it has gone that it is enjoying now. There will still be a stratification of the public, people who can afford choice and who demand higher levels of service, better food, larger, more sumptuous rooms, better meeting facilities, more fascinating entertainment attractions, they will migrate to places that provide that.
Other places that deal to the economy end of the market, such as Circus Circus or in Las Vegas or other places in Macau, they have their own level of competition. But you know there's Kmart and there's Louis Vuitton. There's Macy's and there's Neiman Marcus. They compete Neiman Marcus competes with other companies of a similar nature. We do as well.
Louis Vuitton competes with Chanel and Christian Dior and Prada. And we're at that level. We're the 5 star operator. We offer choices for people that want the best. And when we do that, we, to a certain extent, give up another part of the market to other people.
So it's good that a place like Macau or Las Vegas has choice for people. What's wonderful about Macau and Las Vegas is that if you come to that city, you can go from Wynn to Circus, you can go to a lower end casino to win in Macau. And you can dial up whatever it is that suits you at the moment. And that's the secret to making a great destination city, is choice. The bigger the menu, the more powerful the destination resort.
But I assure you that every level, there's competition. Am I being helpful to you?
Yes. I can recall in Las Vegas during the downturn, operators would tend to reach down market and promote more.
And they laid off and they lowered their expenses and they laid off thousands and thousands of people not here, because in the business that I'm in, I cannot juggle my service levels. I cannot bounce my staff around because the market gets soft. No, no. We have to have a capital structure that allows us to maintain our service levels, to protect the job security of our employees. And hopefully, at the end of the downturn, we end up with a bigger market share, which is exactly what happened to us.
But in order to do that, you have to have a strong capital structure. When the government interferes with the viability of the enterprise, they take that ability for us to protect our employees away from us, a dangerous thing to do from any perspective.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have run out of allotted time for our Q and A session today. I will hand the program back over to Mr. Wynne for any closing remarks.
Matt, Steve Cooney, Ian Coughlin, Mr. Aziz, Mr. Wooden, would you like to add anything? No. No.
You said it all, Steve. Okay. Well, I don't know that this has been the most satisfying quarterly phone call we've ever had, but at least it's the most candid and the most honest one that we could possibly give everybody that is interested in our company. And hopefully, it sheds light. It sheds real intelligence and insight on the inevitability of anything that interferes with the long term health of Macau or Las Vegas for that matter.
And I've done my best to shine a light on that subject. And I thank you all for your attention and we'll talk and see what happens 90 days from now. Bye bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, this