Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming October 2015 20 world for five years running, and VIP, which accounted for 72% of it, enjoyed its best year for revenue growth ever, blowing past 2009 by 70%. Las Vegas Sands, MGM and Wynn Resorts were raking it in in Macau. Baccarat wagers on the Strip broke the $10 billion mark. Inventory had grown to 241 tables at 17 casinos, and the game surpassed $1 billion in win for the first time, supplanting blackjack as the biggest money-maker in tables. For the first time in memory, tables generated more annual revenue than slots. Moreover, better than 40% of table revenue was coming from less than 10% of table supply. In recession-era Vegas, baccarat had become the name of the game. This was not lost on Lim Kok Thay, billionaire chairman and CEO of Malaysia-based resort conglomerate Genting. A decade before, Genting had entered the U.S. market with its purchase of Miami-based Norwegian Cruise Lines. The company later won a license in New York for a giant racino, Resorts World New York City, which opened in 2011 at Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, and at the time was lobbying aggressively for a luxury casino in downtown Miami. Early in 2013, the company bought 87 acres at the north end of the Las Vegas Strip for $350 million and announced plans for Resorts World Las Vegas, the world’s first top-to-bottom Chinese-themed gaming resort. VISAS FOR SALE To get an idea of the impact of Genting’s announcement, it had been almost three years at that point since a greenfield resort opened on the Strip—that was The Cosmopolitan, a five-star showplace that has struggled mightily to make money in the casino, turning its first quarterly profit only this year. When it debuted at the end of 2010 as a repossessed asset of Deutsche Bank’s (private-equity giant Blackstone bought it last year for less than half its $4 billion A local condominium developer is marketing EB-5 visas to Chinese investors interested in a piece of the Lucky Dragon, a boutique casino with 200 hotel rooms slated to open in 2016 as ‘an authentic Asian cultural and gaming experience’. Asian gaming is evolving away from a VIP- centric business model to a mass-market model driven less by gambling and more by tourism. A Las Vegas model, in other words. Cover Story