Last Sunday’s finale meeting at Sha Tin was a fitting climax to what has been an exceptional and very fruitful racing season, with 74,000 people coming along to the racecourses and the day’s turnover reaching a whopping HK$1.47 billion.
After the last race we were also able to announce some very pleasing figures for the season, the highlight being total racing turnover of over HK$86 billion – the highest since 1997/98 season. On another happy note, the horse race betting duty we paid the Government hit the HK$10 billion mark for the first time since 2001/02, reflecting the Club’s ever-increasing importance as a major tax contributor for the SAR.
Adding icing to the cake, we saw encouraging growth in our simulcast turnover, which rose 19.5 per cent to over HK$1.62 billion. This reflects the growing "internationalisation" of our racing fans in recent years, many of whom take strong interests in overseas races and closely follow the performances of top racehorses around the world.
Apart from these excellent financial figures, I’m very pleased to see a revival in attendance this season – back close to the two million mark. This is an encouraging endorsement of our efforts to identify different customer segments and provide them with specially-tailored, customer-centric services, a strategy that has seen us launch several new and well-received racecourse facilities over the past season.
I told the media on Sunday that I rated it the best season we'd had in Hong Kong racing, and I really do believe that. I also noted that horse racing was one of Hong Kong's very few world class brands, and stressed that the Club would continue investing more to maintain this brand position around the world.
Meeting the needs of today's more digitally-aware racing customers is one of the key issues for racing operators worldwide, and is one of the main discussion topics at the 34th Asian Racing Conference being held this week in Turkey’s largest city Istanbul, from where I am now writing. Many of my colleagues are also here with me, as being a core member of the Asian Racing Federation, the Club has brought a 40-strong delegation to this year’s conference.
During the four-day conference, my colleagues and I chaired and attended a number of plenary sessions, sharing our latest views and experiences with other racing industry leaders from different member jurisdictions of the Asian Racing Federation. Meanwhile, I’m honoured to be elected as the Vice-Chairman of ARF, as it again shows the Club’s important status on the international stage.
Yesterday I chaired the first plenary session, which was titled “The Race for the Digitally Empowered Consumer”. Apart from sharing Hong Kong's own experience in providing customers with digitally advanced services, I urged other racing’s industry leaders to realign their customer strategies, so as to connect consistently with their customers and attract new people to the sport.
What we need to do, I suggested our colleagues in other countries, is change from an inside-out practice of “we make, you take” to an outside-in approach that takes into account customer segmentation and tells customers “your problems are our problems, today and tomorrow”.
Global internet usage has grown over 500% since December 2000 and clearly the online market is our major potential growth area. But to my mind, technology itself is merely an enabler. Content is the key and that content must be relevant to what our customers want. In this regard, I feel that our competitors in the leisure market have generally made better use of technology to grow their customer base, and shown a better understanding of what new customers desire.
I told the delegates that racing now has to find its way to compete with contemporary appeal in order to recruit new fans. We must provide content that is rich in digital technology to reconnect horse racing, a centuries old game, with today’s customers. If we can succeed in understanding our customers and the needs of different customer segments, we will also succeed in opening up new horizons for horse racing.
We had a very lively discussion on these issues and it was useful to hear the experiences of other Asian jurisdictions in tackling them. I am also pleased that a lot of the attending guests show great interest in what I shared at the session. Given the huge penetration rate of the internet and mobile technologies across Asia, I believe this region has the chance to lead the world in embracing this new digital technology era.
Although the local racing season has now entered the summer break, I will continue sharing with you some of my latest thoughts and happenings when the opportunity arises, so do keep checking here from time to time. May I wish you all having a great summer. See you again soon!
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