Macau Business Daily – In a phone interview with Business Daily, Las Vegas-based gaming consultant Dean Macomber said that some new Asian casino destinations could actually bring new visitors to Macau, rather than drawing existing Macau customers elsewhere.
The president of Macomber International Inc explained that more venues might increase consumer interest in casino gambling. New players might start at a new resort close to home and then become curious about sampling Macau’s venues.
Mr Macomber said that could be the case with the proposed new gaming resort near Vladivostok in the Russian Far East.
Yes, with some conditions. You may have heard about the Pricewaterhouse[Coopers] report that was done in 2011 that forecast worldwide gaming revenue basically by sector and country.
Although a lot of people state a lot of opinions about the decrease of the rate of growth, if you take 12.5 percent [in Macau] that seems to be tracking the last 12 months, that’s about US$4.75 billion [37.9 billion patacas] in increase of gaming revenue per year. Back in 2005, Macau generated about US$6 billion in gaming revenue, so that would have been an 80 percent increase. Now, we look at the same increase, and we say it’s only 12.5 percent. It’s not as high as 46 percent [year-on-year] and people start saying that Macau is slowing down. It’s really not slowing down in one sense, its slowing down because of the statistics being divided by annual gaming revenue that is five times what it was only eight years ago.
You’ve got other experts saying the market can grow to around US$60 billion, you’ve got a market growing at about 12.5 percent, which is about US$4.75 billion a year, you’ve got the largest country feet away, which is the People’s Republic of China. They have been growing a double-digit growth in recent history, but have slowed – which is almost laughable because the rest of the world would love to have it – to about 7.5 percent to 8 percent.
Still, based on the huge size of that economy, if Macau only grew 7.5 percent [annually] that still produces huge increases in revenues, and so far Macau’s gaming revenue [year-on-year expansion] has exceeded the GDP growth of China.
Each of the concessionaires and sub-concessionaires has projects planned for Cotai. If you lump those together plus the Louis XIV project, it’s probably about US$16 billion in investment over the next three to five years.
