Genting Hong Kong and its Philippine partner, Alliance Global Group, plan to take their Resorts World Manila casino public in a bid to raise funds for future projects, among them a second mega-casino in the Philippines capital.
Travellers International Hotel Group, as their joint venture is known, will look to raise more than US$500 million in a PSX listing which news sources say will be the subject of an initial public offering in the third quarter.
The partnership is developing a $1.1 billion casino hotel known as Resorts World Bayshore as part of the government-sponsored Entertainment City resort complex on Manila Bay. Due to open in 2016, the facility will join four large-scale gambling palaces at the site. The first, Solaire Resort & Casino, owned by the Philippines’ Bloomberry Resorts, opened in March. The second, Belle Grande Manila Bay, a joint venture between Philippines retail giant SM Group and Macau’s Melco Crown Entertainment, is slated to open sometime next summer. The fourth, Manila Bay Resorts, a partnership between the Philippines’ Robinsons Land and a subsidiary of Japanese pachinko tycoon Kazuo Okada’s Universal Entertainment, also plans to open in 2016.
Resorts World Manila debuted in 2009 across from Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It’s the largest casino in the country—comprising 1,800 slot machines, 300 table games, 1,574 rooms in three hotels, a 30,000-square-meter shopping mall, cinemas and a performing arts theater—and it immediately became the country’s gaming revenue leader as well, doubling the size of the market to around $2 billion.
The Philippines government is looking to Entertainment City to boost that growth further and put the country on the map as a regional gaming and tourism destination. Analysts generally are enthusiastic about the potential and forecast the market could grow to $3 billion to $5 billion annually over the next few years.
