Macao gambling industry outpaces Las Vegas
Macao may not be hitting the astronomical growth targets set by excitable financial analysts, but the Chinese gambling enclave is still growing much faster than Las Vegas, the US gambling capital. The tiny former Portuguese colony - the only legal place to place bets in China - has posted a 47 percent increase in annual gambling revenue, outpacing Las Vegas and pushing it even further ahead of the Las Vegas strip in terms of total gaming revenue.
That’s good news for casino operators in Macao, led by Stanley Ho’s Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM), which had a monopoly on the gambling market until 2002, and new US entrants like Las Vegas Sands Corp, which opened the world’s largest casino in Macao last summer.
According to figures released recently by Macao’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, casinos in Macao took in gross gaming revenue of $10.34 billion in 2007, up 47 percent from about $7.05 billion the year before.
The huge growth comes on the back of a massive expansion on the island and an adjacent stretch of reclaimed land called the Cotai Strip. The building boom took off after Macao, which has only half a million inhabitants.
Four new casinos opened in Macao last year, including Las Vegas Sands’ massive Venetian Macao on the Cotai Strip, and new MGM Grand Macau casino resort on the main peninsula.
Another casino opened in January and five more are slated to open this year, plus as many as nine next year.
The growth revenue may not meet the wildest hopes of some financial analysts, expecting an explosion of business from gambling-starved Chinese, but it is still very strong.
At the end of December, Macao had 4,375 gaming tables and 13,267 slot machines in 28 casinos. That is well up from 2,762 tables and 6,546 slots in 24 casinos at the same time a year earlier.
By comparison, Las Vegas, which also has some big development plans in the pipeline, is growing much more slowly.
The original gambling mecca is a much more mature market and is grappling with how to sustain growth in the face of a downturn in the US economy
In 2007, casinos on the Las Vegas strip took in gaming revenue of $6.83 billion, according to Nevada’s Gaming Control Board on Tuesday, up only 2.1 percent from the year before.
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