Las Vegas No Longer the Biggest Casino Center In the World

27.01.2007, Lesen Sie hier den Bericht über «Las Vegas No Longer the Biggest Casino Center In the World»

It is a typical Friday evening in Macau and three women are singing on stage at the Las Vegas Sands Casino in front of an audience of thousands. But no one is listening. Everyone is jammed around the 800 tables, focused on the flip of cards, the spin of the roulette wheel or the roll of dice. Opened in May 2004 with 360 tables, the casino has been expanding ever since and is now the largest under one roof in the world. It is just one of many new casinos in Macau. In September another Las Vegas operator, Steve Wynn, opened a casino aimed at a slightly wealthier clientele; it was followed in October by the Galaxy, intended for a less affluent crowd. According to figures released this week, Macau's gambling receipts increased by 22% in 2006 to reach 55.9 billion patacas ($6.95 billion), placing Macau just ahead of the Las Vegas strip, previously the global leader.

The customers, primarily from mainland China but also from Hong Kong and South-East Asia, show some clear preferences. They like clean, new facilities: the no-smoking room at the Sands is overflowing. They like to take part, not just watch: Macau has only half as many visitors as Las Vegas. They also like to shop and eat well. In the lobby of the Wynn Casino there is a long queue at the Louis Vuitton store (its bags are said to bring luck) and the elegant Chinese restaurant is full.

All of this is bad news for Macau's old casinos. Until 2002, gambling was the monopoly of Stanley Ho, a politically connected Hong Kong tycoon who continues to dominate the market with 17 casinos. But at the Palace, a floating casino in an ideal spot near the ferry from Hong Kong, the carpet is worn, the grimy dining room is empty and on the gambling floors upstairs there is not a single punter. Not far away at the Lucky Dragon, a casino Mr Ho carved out of an office building in 2005 to compete with the new arrivals from Las Vegas, a few people sit listlessly on stools around an electronic roulette wheel.

Mr Ho is no fool. His business model is already changing. A vast casino, the Grand Lisboa, is taking shape behind his current Lisboa flagship. Star Cruises, the world's third-largest cruise line, said on January 22nd that Mr Ho had purchased a large stake and that it would build a big new casino in Macau. And MGM, another big Las Vegas operator, has almost completed its own vast new casino with its local partner, Mr Ho's daughter Pansy.

Meanwhile, Mr Wynn will double the size of his casino in July. A bigger Galaxy has already begun to take shape on Macau's shoreline. Then there is the Venetian, a $2 billion Las Vegas Sands project. As well as a vast casino, it will include a 15,000-seat arena, a convention centre, a shopping mall with 190 stores (and 160 more on the way), and 12 hotels arranged along a Venice-style canal. Other new casinos are on the drawing board, too.

The number of visitors to Macau has grown from 10m in 2003 to 22m in 2006 and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank, estimates the number will reach 45m by 2009. Yet the boom has put pressure on wages and new competition is coming from Singapore and perhaps from Hong Kong. Fragile balance sheets and heavy investment demands prompted Standard & Poor's, a rating agency, to place negative credit outlooks on Sands in May and Galaxy in December. Any other industry would worry, but casinos are not for the nervous. “We describe this as spitting on the floor,” says William Weidner, Sands's president. “You can't miss.”

-- The Economist

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