Macau rising as Asia's casino capital
BY TIM JOHNSON
Knight Ridder News Service
MACAU - Once a backwater for hardcore gamblers, the former
Portuguese colony of Macau is rising fast as Asia's entertainment
and casino capital.
Some now call Macau the ''Las Vegas of the East,'' and Macau's
gaming revenues are on par with those of the Las Vegas Strip.
Macau, however, is growing even faster than Las Vegas. It's on the
threshold of a gaming boom, with more than a dozen casinos and
resorts on the drawing boards or under construction, the result of
a 2001 decision to open its doors to foreign casino operators. Two
years later, mainland authorities agreed to let visitors cross the
border more freely.
Macau's first U.S.-operated casino, the Sands Macau, opened in
2004. This autumn, a second U.S. casino and 600-room hotel, Wynn
Resorts Macau, will debut. The $1 billion MGM Grand Macau will
follow in 2007. The U.S. operators are bringing panache and
entertainment, and they hope to turn Macau into a hot convention
destination.
Macau drew 18.7 million tourists last year, more than the country
of Germany, and plans to lure 35 million a year by the end of the
decade, about what Las Vegas gets now.
''It is on the cusp of getting launched,'' said David J. Green, the
director of gaming practice in Macau for the accounting and
consulting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Macau, a port established 450 years ago by Portuguese traders and
Catholic missionaries, has long been overshadowed by Hong Kong, the
former British colony that's an hour-long ferry ride to the east.
Producing little revenue of its own, tiny Macau legalized gambling
in 1847.
In the decade before Portugal handed Macau back to China in 1999,
the enclave was plagued by casino-linked gangs avenging debts with
daylight killings.
Macau's monopolycontrolled casinos, run for decades by Hong Kong
gambling tycoon Stanley Ho, were havens for VIPs in smoke-filled
rooms. Signs reminded gamblers not to spit on the floor. Most
customers came from Hong Kong. A few trickled in from China.
A series of factors after Macau's 1999 handover to China led to the
boom. The liberalization of the casino sector coincided with a
crippling SARS epidemic in southern China in 2003. To help Hong
Kong's suffering economy, mainland authorities relaxed travel
restrictions to Hong Kong and Macau. Chinese began to flood across
the border. Casinos are illegal on the mainland, yet China's 1.3
billion citizens itch to get rich quickly and travel outside
traditional borders.