Bizcuits | How real is Macau’s CSR?

Leanda Lee

Once hauled up for using an unrecognisable acronym by some seriously educated chaps, I realized my fatal writer’s error: assuming reader knowledge. It hadn’t dawned upon me that CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility – may not be a familiar term. Seeing the global regulatory push for Environmental, Social and Governance metrics to be reported by public companies; community demand for businesses to become integrated into the fabric of a sustainable world, and locally, the uptake of CSR initiatives now being publicised almost every second day by the gaming concessionaires, the concept is firmly on the public agenda.

We expect our most influential companies to engage in community outreach activities. The bigger a company, the greater its impact, and thus the greater its responsibility to act in the best interests of all stakeholders.

Macau is a unique case-study in the degree of influence wielded by one industry. Such companies do both harm (if poorly managed) and good (if various forms of capital are used to help communities thrive). Macau has seen improved infrastructure, rising average salaries, public revenue, more entertainment options, improved community amenity, introduction of international standards, and visitor growth as the gaming industry has developed. On the downside are pollution (air, water, sea, land), gaming-related vices, a tight labour market squeezing out other businesses, work stress, increased population and congestion.

A well-worn response to an awareness of these effects on communities and eco-systems is that the company begins to justify focusing on other stakeholders, while retaining its primary responsibility to its shareholders. However, this approach to stakeholders as being separate, means that CSR activities that are not core to the business are, by definition, unsustainable. 

One business model, that brings the stakeholders together in mutually beneficial ways, views all providers of capital as a team. An example of the Team Production Model in action is the ongoing training and development of staff which has really hit its stride since around 2009 in Macau. Once viewed as an expense to minimise, staff are now valued for all their current and future potential: they are trained, and their broader welfare looked after. Now Macau is also experiencing a concerted effort by companies to develop suppliers:  the relationship is no longer just a transaction from business-to-business because there is an awareness that knowledge and skills transfers and other forms of support can be mutually beneficial. These are sustainable forms of CSR.

The company that can develop these mutually enhancing, sustainable relationships with all the forms of capital that they use will create for themselves a competitive advantage while regenerating the capital it uses and creating thriving local and global eco-systems.

Beyond good-citizenship charity work, sponsorship of sports and cultural events, and gifts to the elderly and orphanages, almost all our gaming companies are now running programs for SMEs and supplier development, and looking after their people, as recently confirmed in the inaugural publication of the “CSR Annual Digest” by GGRAsia Publications.

All the different stages in CSR maturity are here. Some inspired leaders have their sights on the next forms of capital to invest in way beyond the boundaries of Macau and the Greater Bay Area, to make a positive impact at all points of contact in procurement, operations and disposal. Yet others ignore the broader environment (the environment being another form of capital), some greenwash by substituting less environmentally damaging materials without resolving the throwaway mentality, or take baby steps in energy efficiencies and water management (one rain-water system at a Cotai property annually harvests the equivalent of 5 of the tanks up the back of my Australian garden – it is a whopping big tank up there among the veggies, but it’s still just a suburban tank). 

There is good corporate citizenship, charity, philanthropy, public relations and advertising. Then there is CSR, and sustainable CSR. Macau has it all: it is worth knowing the difference.