Inside Asian Gaming

september 2016 inside asian gaming 13 Sheldon Adelson isn’t one of the industry’s own. He made his fortune producing and selling trade shows. He’s the great casino showman he is, one of only a handful, because he is never content merely to exploit markets, he’s driven to envision new ones, and like all great entrepreneurs he must continually challenge himself to summon them into existence. It was conventions, not gambling, that brought him to Las Vegas. He had the Sands Expo, the largest privately owned convention center in the world, and he wondered if it was possible, with the right product, to change how Las Vegas hotel rooms were marketed. So he set about inventing a resort for transforming rooms from comps into machines for printing money. It would redefine commerce on the Strip. When he came to the other side of the world and they pointed him to a swath of reclaimed marsh land between the two small Macau islands of Taipa and Coloane, which the government thought might be suitable for a fireworks factory, he saw the one thing Macau, for all of its action and money, didn’t have – the space to create a cluster of resorts on a Las Vegas scale. This is what you do when you’re from the outside, as Mr Adelson is, and you look at things as he does – from the outside. He creates resorts that change the way people think about markets. They set new standards. They are icons. He has built them in Vegas, in Singapore, in China twice: with Macau’s first Western-style casino for the masses and its first themed megaresort. Macau, as we know, has never been the same. The Venetian Macao was the seventh-largest building in the world when it opened in August 2007. The immensity of it – 3,000 rooms and suites, 3,400 slot machines, 800 table games, 150,000 square meters of retail, 110,000 square meters of meetings and convention space, a 15,000-seat arena – opened everyone’s eyes. There was the Cotai Strip, just like that. And suddenly it was possible to imagine a market liberated from the claustrophobia of those smoke-filled baccarat rooms, the remorselessness of them, their inherent limitations. Macau could be someplace fantastical, magical, where you could spend a lot of money but you could have fun, a place to bring the kids and take pictures to send back home, where casinos could make money in ways that didn’t exist in Macau before. Does he do it again with The Parisian Macao? It’s not a fair question anymore. Not even at US$2.7 billion. It’s a different world. The unbridled gambling demand, that’s gone, probably for good. But maybe that’s as much as saying that Mr Adelson may be closer than he’s ever been to getting it precisely right. There is nothing in the market like The Parisian and should it outshine The Venetian he will have surpassed himself. He will have come full circle. His greatest feat. As he said recently, “Our goal to create a large-scale leisure and business destination in Macau, which started with the opening of The Venetian nearly 10 years ago, will be fully realized when The Parisian opens its doors. It’s unlikely another tourism development with the size and scope of the Cotai Strip will ever be achieved again.” Sheldon Adelson CHAIRMAN AND CEO Las Vegas Sands CHAIRMAN AND CEO Sands China Power 8,315 Last 1 Score year Claims to fame A visionary and entrepreneur extraordinaire, he redefined the hotel model on the Las Vegas Strip His iconic buildings have expanded the concept of the integrated resort Founder of the Cotai Strip, he has orchestrated Macau’s transformation into a destination resort 1 Asian Gaming POWER 50 2 0 1 6