March was a pretty slow month for Macau. But its casinos raked in $4.4 billion, about two-thirds of what Las Vegas casinos make in a year.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes and author of Hong Kong On Air
I’ve begun to blog for Forbes.com about the casino business in Macau and around Asia, which I’ve been covering for nearly a decade, now as editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming. Please follow my blog and visit my site and posts early and often since Forbes.com pays by the click.
If you are interested in the gaming business in Asia as an industry executive, player or investor, I hope you’ll find the blog pieces interesting. Even if you don’t care about gaming in Asia, I hope you’ll click to help me earn some money. Unlike playing in the casino, you can’t lose.
I’ll still post some non-gaming items here, so please stay tuned. I know how busy our lives are and how crowded the online world has become, so I truly appreciate your attention and support. I hope you’ll keep taking your chances with me.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes.com and author of Hong Kong On Air
I’ve begun to blog for Forbes.com about the casino business in Macau and around Asia, which I’ve been covering for nearly a decade, now as editor at large for Inside Asian Gaming. Please follow my blog and visit my site and posts early and often since Forbes.com pays by the click.
If you are interested in the gaming business in Asia as an industry executive, player or investor, I hope you’ll find the blog pieces interesting. Even if you don’t care about gaming in Asia, I hope you’ll click to help me earn some money. Unlike playing in the casino, you can’t lose.
I’ll still post some non-gaming items here, so please stay tuned. I know how busy our lives are and how crowded the online world has become, so I truly appreciate your attention and support. I hope you’ll keep taking your chances with me.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is a blogger for Forbes.com and author of Hong Kong On Air
Macau’s gaming revenue topped $45 billion last year, about seven times the house take in Las Vegas. But the real excitement is about where visitors are coming from.
The majority of mainland visitors to Macau, 18.6 million last year, no longer come from immediately neighboring Guangdong province. Travelers from more distant parts of China are arriving in greater numbers. As I wrote in Journey to the South (page 68, payment required), that’s a very welcome development.
Sources interviewed for the article in the January issue of Macau Business pointed out that these guests, mainly from northern and central China, tend to stay longer and spend more. They’re more likely to treat their trip to Macau as a vacation, or at least an occasion, rather than a surgical strike on baccarat tables.
Half of the visitors to Macau don’t even stay a night, walking back across the border into Guangdong or taking a ferry back to Hong Kong. Visitors traveling from greater distances are more likely not only to stay in hotels, but take in Macau’s sights, eat in its restaurants, and maybe even sample its small but growing roster of entertainment options beyond the casino floor.
Even more mainlanders will be heading south with the arrival of Chimelong, a popular mainland theme park operator, on Guangdong’s Hengqin Island, within spitting distance of Macau’s Cotai casino cluster, its version of the Las Vegas Strip. Chimelong’s International Ocean Kingdom, phase one of five resort development plan, opened last week, just in time for the Chinese new year holiday. Analysts at Union Gaming Group estimate Chimelong will attract up to 2 million visitors this year, and Chimelong officials have targeted 20 million annually when it’s complete. China’s official news agency acknowledged many Chimelong guests will cross the bridge to Macau as part of the trip.
Macau and mainland authorities have long urged Macau to diversify its revenue beyond gaming, hoping that it can someday mirror Las Vegas, where casino resorts record most of their revenue from non-gaming sources, including hotels, shows clubs and restaurants. Visitors from northern and central China nudge Macau’s needle in that direction.
But it’s a faint shadow of what the authorities wanted when they brought the creators of modern Las Vegas, Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn and Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson, to Macau. Officials expected they’d transform Macau into an international travel and convention destination. Instead, ten years after Adelson opened Sands Macao to begin Macau’s boom, getting mainland visitors to travel a few hundred miles to get there constitutes cause for celebration.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
The land of the rising sun is the land of rising hopes for the world’s casino industry. As I wrote in Whale hunting, Japan style (see page 86), the world’s third largest economy is the last great frontier for gaming, and virtually every casino company in the world wants to be in it. Macau casino companies keep upping the ante, with spending pledges for a Japan project reaching $5 billion.
The article in the October issue of Macau Business points out there’s already a well-established market for gambling, including pachinko parlors with illegal payoff windows next door, Yakuza-run remote broadcast of live casino games from legal gaming jurisdictions, and the world’s most heavily bet horse racing.
For years, Japanese politicians have said that it’s time to make casinos legal, most notably Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who promised to push for casino legalization during his previous, truncated term succeeding Junichiro Koizumi in 2006. Last week, his ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) introduced casino legislation, and the long anticipated bill is widely expected to pass. This time, casinos are packaged as part of Abenomics, the prime minister’s plan to reform Japan’s economy and lift it out of its quarter century long doldrums.
The draft casino bill outlines a multilayered process for bringing casinos to Japan. The national bureaucracy will draft the rules, while local governments weigh whether they want casinos in their jurisdictions. Against the promise of investment, jobs and (mainly domestic) tourists, there’s the perception of gambling as a seedy activity, embodied by pachinko parlors with their legacy of money laundering, drugs and bribery. Japan’s National Police oppose casino legalization, along with some civic organizations, Buddhist groups and fringe opposition parties.
Gambling also has a reputation for government boondoggles, embodied in overbuilt publicly funded speedboat race courses and overstaffing at horse tracks. A government sponsored theme park construction initiative, with similar goals to casino development, fizzled into a puddle of wasted public money.
Mix in Japan’s inherent social conservatism, and, despite politicians’ support, casinos face an uphill fight. The seven year tease for the world’s casino companies may be over soon, or it may have only just begun.
Totally globalized native New Yorker and former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is author of Hong Kong On Air
