Chris Morris Casino
He’s the tech entrepreneur who 40 years ago founded Australia’s most successful tech company ever, made an absolute fortune and bought a tropical island off North Queensland’s coast which sparked a spate of acquisitions. With redevelopments underway at his spa retreat in the Daintree Rainforest, his outback cattle station west of Cairns, and The Ville Resort—Casino in Townsville, Chris Morris’ tourism empire in sunny NQ is almost complete.
Sitting in an ocean-view boardroom at The Ville Resort–Casino, talking about property’s newest outlet, The Quarterdeck, Melbourne businessman Chris Morris points out the window towards Magnetic Island and says simply, “that view is magic”. Finally, The Ville’s facing the water.
July 16, 2015 6:30am RICH-lister Chris Morris owns a casino, an island, a cattle station and a helicopter company, and now he has splashed his money into a $40 million water park. The Creek Nation, operator of the River Spirit Casino Resort, is among tribes that prohibit visitors from carrying firearms in the casino. Pittsburg County Sheriff Chris Morris.
Since mid-2015, Chris’ company Morris Group, which acquired Townsville’s aging elephant of a casino-hotel for $70 million, has been redeveloping the property into a total entertainment destination. Stage 1 will be completed in the coming weeks, with a bill circa-$42 million. (Contractor Hutchinson’s Builders has used 84% local contractors on the project.) At the same time, Chris and Morris Group are completing upgrades to their other properties within their Northern Escape Collection including a refresh at Daintree Eco Lodge and a new-build resort at Mt Mulligan Station west of Cairns. Adding to these, Chris owns Orpheus Island Lodge and its northern neighbour Pelorus Island (purchased in 2017), giving him the trifecta in Australian tourism – reef, rainforest and outback.
It was never Chris’ intention to be in hospitality though, or his vision to own tourism businesses. In fact, he says he’s never really had ‘visions’, even for his first company, Computershare.
By his own admission, Chris Morris was terrible at school. “I failed everything except for maths,” he tells, attributing his performance to the typical distractions for teenage boys. So, Chris’ mother enrolled him in a three-month computer course at Taylors College, Melbourne. It was 1966 and the first ever computer course in Australia.
From that course, Chris worked for the first computer bureau in Melbourne (this was long before PCs), and eventually he started working on share registry systems. In 1978, he joined with business partner Ken Milner to found Computershare and provide computer bureau services to Australian share registrars. “We had 49%,” recalls Chris. “We worked with a bureau, which had the big computer, and they had 51%. Everyone back then used to run their own registries, or they were run by chartered accountants. Within five years, just about everyone in Australia used us. We then did what everyone does – we went to New Zealand first, then UK, then when we got brave we went to the US. We were one the first companies to use PCs as distributive processors instead of the big old green terminals – if you can remember them.”
By 1992, Chris and his business partner had bought out the bureau’s 51%. “They were raiding our super funds; we didn’t take them on and instead bought their 51% for I think $50,000. Then Ken said, ‘let’s sack everyone’ – we had all the major companies using our software and it would take them three or four years to catch up to us. I couldn’t do that, so some other staff and I bought him out. He sold for $2 million for 50% of the company which today is worth around $9.5 billion.”
Computershare was floated on the Australian stock exchange in 1994.
“We [Computershare] have 18,000 people globally in 27 countries and manage the debt and companies’ registries of most of the major listed companies globally. It’s by far the most successful IT Company Australia’s ever had by a long way.”
Chris Morris Christopher Morris Band
Tourism and hospitality tycoon Chris Morris affirms to have bought the “worst-performing casino” in Australia, but after a $20 million makeover, the Townsville casino will be a gold mine that will fund his growing Queensland tourism empire.
Chris Morris, ranked #47 by Forbes in the Australia’s 50 richest, is a self-made millionaire with a net worth of $590 million. In 1978, he founded a global share-registry company Computershare, one of the first and biggest technology success stories in Australia, which brought him his name and wealth and of which is he is currently a non-executive chairman. Even though he has never been a dazzling software developer and programmer, his vision and strong feeling for great business opportunities is what brought him to the place he is at right now. Currently, with his experience and his money, Morris can afford investing into Australian casinos although he has resisted installing pokies machines in his hotels and pubs on the grounds they are immoral. However, he does not have a problem with them in casinos, since people make a conscious decision to go to casinos and spend money on gambling nevertheless.
Morris’s Colonial Leisure Group entered into an agreement to buy Echo Entertainment Group’s Jupiters Townsville casino for $70 million in January. They sealed the deal last month after having received the probity clearance.
Chris Morris Casino Atlantic City
Echo Entertainment Group, one of Australia’s largest publicly listed entertainment, said in January that Jupiters Townsville had limited expansion opportunities and divesting the casino would allow the company to focus on its other properties in Sydney, Brisbane and Gold Coast.
“With our fingers firmly on the pulse of pleasure, leisure and reinvention, Echo Entertainment Group is the catalyst for your entertainment. Echo Entertainment Group is like entertainment itself … forever evolving,” states the company. Therefore, it is only logical that they have been trying to sell Jupiters Townsville casino for two years, as its one and only income was from the gambling facilities and even expanding it would not bring any profit in the near future.
The Australian Financial Review had an interview with Chris Morris, in which he claimed that the property had great potential, but due to the lack of investment, was in a sad condition.
Mr. Morris said the waterside casino is the “best spot in Townsville” but an outdated design has not made enough of the views out to the spectacular Magnetic Island. And although the place gets around 2,000 visitors a day, it has struggled to encourage spending outside of the 350 poker machines and 50 gaming tables, he said. Gambling was the only Jupiters’ function, and the potential for the other activities and entertainment was not used to its fullest.
“The only reason people were going there was to gamble,” he said. “The food and beverage offering … was very average.”
Chris Morris, will spend at least $20 million on the major renovation and refurbishment, and on entirely redesigning the venue. He is going to introduce multiple restaurants and bars into the facility, which is typical of his hotels in Perth and Melbourne. It is a long-term project and he does not expect to make a profit for the next four years. The Jupiters deal drives his investments in Queensland in the past three years over $100 million. Mr. Morris’s vision is to create high-end packages for international tourists that wish to visit the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree and the outback. Thus they could stay at his trio of exceptional venues. He targets rich tourists who can afford paying $1400 per night and it is definitely important to create an impeccable atmosphere to satisfy all their needs. Mr. Morris is taking his tourism business very seriously. For instance, he bought a fleet of helicopters to transport guests from Cairns to Orpheus Island.
Jupiters will play a crucial role in this plan to not only expand his whopping business but also to follow his dreams. “Having the casino allows you the cash flow to do other things,” he said. And at the age of 66 he can afford it.
Despite the fact that the fight between Echo Entertainment and Crown Resorts to build a new casino in Brisbane and a proposed $8 billion mega gambling resort in Cairns are reinforced by the prospect of a boom in Chinese visitors, Mr. Morris believes his efforts in Townsville are aimed more at the locals, taking into consideration that there are limited direct flights to the regional centre.
To make up for his lack of gaming business experience and to take advantage of Jupiter’s “huge potential”, Mr. Morris has poached a casino guru Brad Morgan, who recently ran SkyCity Entertainment’s Darwin casino.
He said that Jupiters Townsville had been the worst-performing casino in Australia for a while, but why invest into the best-performing business which would be impossible to change and improve?