Akihabara News (Tokyo) — On Tuesday, Clairvest Neem Ventures finally opened an office in Wakayama city, weeks after it was selected to lead the local Integrated Resort (IR) consortium.
The office is a modest affair on the second floor of a nondescript office building in the Junibancho district, walking distance from Wakayama Castle in the center of the city. It is quite distant from the Marina City location of the proposed casino resort.
The Clairvest office is quite unlike the flashy Suncity Group office that had been opened in September 2020 to showcase that Macau firm’s IR plans and to widely appeal to the public as a sort of community center. Indeed, Clairvest is asking visitors to send an email and to make advance arrangements before members of the public drop by their new office.
There are a couple of ironies here.
The first is that in an earlier stage of Japan’s IR race, Clairvest was often the first to open a small local office. This was the case in both Sasebo, Nagasaki, and Tomakomai, Hokkaido. However, they have only now opened a local office in Wakayama, the location where they actually won their bid.
The second irony is that among the IR operators that at one time sought to lead IR development in Wakayama—Suncity Group, Bloomberry Resorts, Groupe Barriere—the ultimate winner, Clairvest, was the one which made the weakest effort to build local community relations.
That was also the case for Nagasaki, where the firm that won, Casinos Austria International, was also the most silent and least engaged in public marketing activities.
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