Inside Asian Gaming

34 W hen Inside Asian Gaming started covering Macau’s gaming market in 2005,the drafter of the city’s gaming legislation, Jorge Oliveira, described slot machines as “mere decorative elements,” and predicted casino operators would be reluctant to invest in ma- chines, given the much higher returns to be derived from putting in more gaming tables. At the time, the city’s string of trendy Mocha Slot clubs were slowly gaining in popularity, with founder Lawrence Ho de- termined to make slots—known as “hungry tigers” in the local Cantonese dialect—more popular among Chinese players. Mr Ho claimed that before he launched Mocha in 2003, the city’s casinos only installed slots in order to “look more like a casino.” Although tables still dominate Macau ca- sino revenue, slot earnings are showing ex- plosive growth,and machines are taking up a greater proportion of the casino floor. When Sands Macao opened in May 2004, it had 277 tables and around 405 slot ma- chines (a slot to table ratio of 1.46). Wynn Macau opened in September last year with 200 tables and 350 slots (a ratio of 1.75). Large casinos in the US often have fewer than 100 tables but thousands of slots, with the bulk of US casino revenue deriving from slots. Las Vegas Sands Corp’s Venetian Macao, when it opens later this month, will not only become the biggest casino in the world with Riding Asia’s Slot Wave Australian slot machine manufacturer Aristocrat Technologies has established market dominance in Macau and much of Asia by working to develop products that are “more suitable and more sensitive to local markets,” according to Aristocrat General Manager Asia Pacific Ken Jolly 850 tables and 4,300 gaming machines, but with its 5.06 slot to table ratio, will increase Macau’s slot count by over 50%. MGM Grand Macau will be unveiled to- wards the end of the year, and while it will not match Venetian’s slot ratio, with 300 tables and 1,000 slots, it will have well over twice as many slots per table as Las Vegas Sands Corp’s preceding property, Sands Ma- cao, featured at its opening. Macau had 8,234 slot machines at the end of the first half of this year, but analysts predict the city will have as many as 50,000 new slots by 2010. On the Cotai Strip alone, Las Vegas Sands Corp plans to add 16,000 slot machines in the next decade as it builds out seven different hotel sites. Asian appeal Aristocrat Technologies is benefiting most from Macau’s slot boom, with over 45% market share in the city as a whole and pro- viding more machines to the soon-to-open Venetian than any other manufacturer. Aristocrat is the world’s second largest supplier of slot machines, after IGT, but has the market share lead in casinos and slots