Letter from Nikkei Asia's editor: Hong Kong Jockey Club builds a lead

Hello from Tokyo. While the yen's recent rally attracted global attention, the Bank of Japan launched a new series of banknotes this month. Each of the new designs features a historical Japanese figure. My favorite is Eiichi Shibusawa, the face of the 10,000 yen bill, though I haven't actually used the new notes yet.

As most students of Japanese history know, Shibusawa lived through one of the country's most turbulent periods, marked by the end of the Edo shogunate and the subsequent restoration of the imperial throne in the late 1860s. The founder of numerous companies and schools, Shibusawa is sometimes called the father of Japanese capitalism.

Much has already been written about him, but one perhaps lesser-known bit of trivia is that Shibusawa's great-grandson is the famous horse racing analyst Keijiro Okawa. Shibusawa was said to be a big fan of gambling, especially when it came to a card game called hanafuda. But Okawa took things to a different level, earning the sobriquet "the god of horse racing" because his predictions were so accurate.

I've never bet on a horse race, but this week's Big Story made me think I should give it a try. The story focuses on the Hong Kong Jockey Club, operator of one of the world's most famous horse racing venues, which reported an all-time high turnover of $304.8 billion Hong Kong dollars ($38.9 billion) for the 2022-23 financial year despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Based on an exclusive interview with the club's CEO, Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, who has led the organization since 2007, the story explains how the Hong Kong Jockey Club is striving to grow its revenues through diversification and other efforts at a time when its peers in Macao and Singapore are closing their