David Lawrence: Philippines positivity points to a brighter future

Friday 18th of December 2020

When we look back at 2020, regardless of business or geographical location, this has been a year of unprecedented disruption, whether personal or work-related, to everyone’s way of life.

In hindsight, the most surprising aspects of this pandemic is the speed at which everything changed and the duration of these changes. While this situation has allowed many of us to spend more time with our families from a business perspective many very difficult decisions have had to be made to stabilize operations

Especially for the hospitality industry the restrictions on movement both locally and internationally had and continue to have a significant impact. While many restrictions remain in place and are only expected to ease slowly, we have seen a gradual increase in business volume and are aware that there is pent up demand in many areas that should benefit us moving forward. The pandemic has also made us explore other options within our operations that we would not normally have considered, time will tell which options we choose to pursue.

The Philippine people are renowned internationally for their resilience and positive outlook on life regardless of the circumstance, indeed in addition to the pandemic we also had to endure several typhoons during the year. This outlook will carry us forward as we see restrictions eased, aided at some point by vaccines. Prior to Covid-19 Philippine gaming was enjoying a boom with revenues up and investment in both existing and new gaming and IR projects being seen. While this boom may have been paused, we firmly believe that Philippine gaming prospects remain very good in the longer term and will be raising a socially distanced glass to 2021 and beyond at the end of December.