Macau casinos in the city on the southeast coast of China are the Asian version of Venice, complete with a Grand Canal and a Rialto Bridge. Soon, it will get a taste of France, with an Eiffel Tower and a giant resort modeled on the Palace of Versailles, as part of a building boom that has brought dozens of cranes to a stretch of reclaimed land here. Macau has grown explosively over the last decade, and another burst of expansion is in full swing as some of the world’s biggest casino operators step up their bet on China’s love for gambling.
Last month, executives of the Macau casino company Sociedade de Jogos de Macau, or SJM, in gold-colored helmets and wielding spades of the same color, broke ground on construction of the Versailles-like Lisboa Palace. The $3.9 billion complex is expected to open in 2017. It will be equipped with 700 gambling tables and feature three hotels — including a Palazzo Versace hotel and a hotel designed by Karl Lagerfeld, the chief designer for the Chanel and Fendi fashion houses.
A former Portuguese colony that was handed back to Chinese control in 1999, Macau casinos now dwarf Las Vegas as a gambling hub. And it epitomizes the rising spending power of Chinese and their economy’s evolution away from heavy-duty manufacturing toward more consumption-oriented growth.
A four-decade monopoly held by a local gambling magnate, Stanley Ho, ended in 2002, opening the floodgates to a building frenzy that resulted in a tripling of casinos, to 35, in a decade. Many are situated on the Cotai Strip, land that was once a stretch of water between the islands of Coloane and Taipa.
Gambling revenue for Macau casinos has soared to nearly 361 billion Macau patacas, or about $46 billion, last year, from 22.2 billion patacas in 2002. By comparison, the Las Vegas Strip generated about $6.5 billion last year, and has experienced little growth over that same period of time.
“It’s astounding what’s happened in the past 10 years,” said Edward M. Tracy, chief executive of Sands China, the Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. “We sit next to the biggest market in the world,” he said. “It’s one billion more people than the U.S.”
