LVS shares gained 18 percent on news that the company may resume building on its mothballed Cotai projects this calendar year.
The operative word is ‘may’. Your newsletter correspondents may all win seven-figure sums on the Hong Kong lottery next week, but it doesn’t mean we will.
Talking up your company’s stock price and then using it as a leveraging tool with your existing creditors and potential investors isn’t a crime. But if you want to guarantee a sustained recovery of your company’s fortunes then you need to pay heed to fundamentals. And the markets are currently very focused on ‘deliverables’ to use a popular piece of management jargon. In the presently jumpy trading conditions share prices can only make sustained recoveries if analysts and investors see hard evidence to back up the warm words.
“We have to get construction back to work as quickly as possible,” Stephen Weaver, President of LVS’s Asian operations told reporters at a briefing in Hong Kong.
Mr Weaver added Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore are still “very privileged” locations for the resort business in the long term, he added.
LVS lost 94 percent of its market value last year following the global credit crisis and negative news about China’s restriction on the issuing of visas for Macau to Chinese citizens.
The company suspended construction projects in Las Vegas and Macau in order to concentrate on its Marina Bay Sands resort in Singapore and a casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
LVS says it is on schedule to open its USD5.4 billion Singapore casino at the end of 2009 in a “fully funded” position, Mr Weaver said. Rental prices at the retail component of Marina Bay Sands, the Singapore resort now under construction, have been “pulled down to adjust to the market,” he added.
