 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. ''The mass market has really exploded here.
More and more people in their mid-20s and mid-30s are coming in . .
. even for the day,'' said Kareem Jalal, the editor of Inside Asian
Gaming.
''There's a lot of untapped wealth.'' Sleaze and crime ebbed.
Macau beefed up its police force to 7,000 officers in a territory
with 482,000 residents. Last year, the United Nations awarded Macau
-- with its East-meets-West merger of cultures, unique cuisine,
colonial churches and black-and-white mosaic walkways -- a coveted
designation as a World Heritage Site. Tiny Macau comprises two
islands and a peninsula -- less than 11 square miles. Its leaders
have prepared for the boom by reclaiming the shallow sea between the
islands of Coloane and Taipa to create new land, the Cotai Strip,
which soon will emulate the one in Las Vegas.
The sprawling 3,000-room Venetian Macau resort and convention
center will open next year, anchoring a promenade of resorts and
casinos. The strip eventually may accommodate 20 new casinos and
resorts, employing 50,000 workers. 'The target is that once all of
Cotai is built in about 10 years' time, there will be 60,000 more
hotel rooms,'' said Buddy Lam, a Sands Macau spokesman. There are
11,042 rooms now, a sign that Macau is outpacing Las Vegas, the
fastest-growing U.S. city over the past quarter century.
Crowds two and three people deep throng around gaming tables in
Macau's 19 casinos. Cheers, boos and clapping commonly erupt.
Chinese gamblers like a noisy atmosphere. As arrivals soar, Macau
casinos can keep minimum bets high -- about $40 -- far higher than
in Las Vegas. Much of Macau's casino revenue, though, is gathered in
VIP rooms where minimum bets are $2,600. Some of the bettors look
like Chinese farmers, wearing cloth-soled shoes and rustic clothing.
Yet they plunk down big money.
A gambling table in a Macau casino generates $17,808 in revenue
per day vs. $2,524 for a similar table in Las Vegas, according to a
report, Macau Mania, issued last year by the investment bank CLSA.
It said that the average Macau visitor spends $322, $40 more than
the average visitor to Las Vegas. Whether Macau can move smoothly
from a gambling destination for high rollers to a mass-market
holiday site remains unclear.
Nearly 60 percent of Macau's visitors are from the mainland, and
some observers say cultural affinities among ethnic Chinese offer
some guarantees. Political upheaval or a health epidemic in China
could disrupt arrivals, experts said, and Singapore, which last year
ended a four-decade ban on casinos, may crimp Macau's growth.
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