Meet Soo Kim, the US ‘corporate fireman’ who’s offered to rescue Star Entertainment
Soo Kim, the man behind the US casino giant making an 11th-hour bid for Star Entertainment, is someone companies call when they get into trouble.
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Soo Kim, the man behind the US casino giant making an 11th-hour bid for Star Entertainment, is a self-described “corporate fireman” whom companies call when they get into trouble.
Mr Kim’s hedge fund, Standard General, took control of Bally’s Corp in a $US4.6bn ($7.2bn) deal last month after previously being its biggest shareholder.
Founded by Mr Kim in 2007, the fund takes “a private equity-like approach to investing in public companies while shorting equities and credit to generate alpha and manage risk during periods of market volatility”.
Bally’s Corp now owns and operates 19 casinos in the US as well as operations in the UK with about 17,700 poker machines, 630 table games and 3950 hotel rooms.
In 2024, it purchased the Trump Organisation’s Trump Golf Links course in New York.
Bally’s traces its roots back to Chicago in the 1930s, selling punch board games and pinball, and eventually becoming a poker machine operator.
Mr Kim, a Korean-American raised in New York, reportedly learned English by watching Sesame Street on TV and has pursued a strategy of targeting companies struggling under crippling debt or already in bankruptcy. In 2015, Standard General helped acquire 1743 RadioShack stores out of bankruptcy.
“We are in a small group of people that don’t mind running into the proverbial smoking building, and we’re corporate firemen,” Mr Kim said in an interview with Inside Asian Gaming after returning from an inspection of Star properties last month.
“We have built one or two casinos but everything else we’ve acquired from others. We are the firm that people call when there’s an opportunity in gaming, and this is an opportunity on the other side of the world.”
Bally’s reported revenue of $US580.4m in its most recent quarter, a decrease of 5.1 per cent year on year. Revenue from its casinos and resorts totalled $US324.4m.
Mr Kim is not without controversy. Last year he filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission in the US accusing it of derailing an $US8.6bn deal to purchase US broadcaster Tegna Inc because of racial discrimination.
Mr Kim said he wanted to install a female chief executive until the regulator blocked the deal in favour of African-American media tycoon Byron Allen.
His father had left Korea for the US in 1977 to complete medical studies in Washington University, St. Louis. After completing his studies, Mr Kim Sr brought his family to join him. “One might think, being the child of a highly educated medical doctor, it would have been easier, but the family made a lot of mistakes and had our share of misfortunes,” Mr Kim said in an interview.
“Like all immigrants, we adjusted because we had to and because it was likely better than the alternative. These were turbulent times for Korea. The economy was developing rapidly but the part of Korea where my family was from, Jeon-Ju, was quite second-world agrarian.”
Prior to founding Standard General, Mr Kim was one of the founding partners and a director of research at Cyrus Capital Partners, as well as holding roles at Och-Ziff Capital Management and the Bankers Trust Company.
With an eye to gaining regulatory approval for the Star deal, Mr Kim has boasted that Bally’s reputation on probity matched any other operator in the sector.
“We embrace regulation, and we are generally aligned to the goals that gaming should be fun, and it shouldn’t be harmful to your customers,” he said. “If you run a business in a manner that’s harmful to your customers, that’s really not a very long-term strategy.”
Mr Kim said Star had “good bones” and he was pleasantly surprised at “how nice everything was”.
“Obviously the Queen’s Wharf property is just this massive development, and a huge step up from what was the Treasury Building,” Mr Kim said.
“The Gold Coast is an older property, but one, again, that’s still the only one of its kind in the area. There’s a lot of potential.”
Mr Kim said he was struggling to understand why Star was performing so poorly but conceded he did not call on management while in Australia.
“We just wanted to see the actual properties in person and that gives some context to the stories we’re reading and the numbers that obviously are published,” he said. “We also have read about all of the probity issues that have befallen the company in the past and that’s something where I feel very confident that we could add a lot of value to.”
Bally’s is opting to acquire all of Star’s properties, believing that is better than a break-up of assets proposed under the deal announced by the company last week that would see Queen’s Wharf in Brisbane sold to its Hong Kong venture partners.
Originally published as Meet Soo Kim, the US ‘corporate fireman’ who’s offered to rescue Star Entertainment
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