San Francisco Gate – An actor in a plush panda suit bounds across the stage with the enthusiasm of a minor league baseball mascot, flanked by acrobats atop bamboo poles, stone-faced kung-fu fighters and over-the-top visual effects rarely seen off the Las Vegas Strip. “PANDA!” — the first Chinese-produced show to take up a long-term residency on the famous tourist corridor — also takes pains to weave in Chinese folklore and motifs, including sweeping views of an ultra-modern Beijing skyline on giant LCD screens. The loose, wordless plot needs no translation. The subtext doesn’t either: A growing, confident China wants respect, not…

Bloomberg – MGM China Holdings Ltd., the Macau casino operator, said first-quarter profit jumped by a third as mass-market gambling increased. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, increased to $257 million from $193 million a year earlier, according to a statement yesterday from MGM Resorts International (MGM), the company’s Las Vegas-based parent. That compares with the median estimate of $258.5 million from six analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News. The numbers exclude a branding fee of $16 million this year and $13 million last year. MGM China will continue to redeploy more gaming tables to mass-market gamblers,…

Forbes – Slumped in white oversize chairs in an enormous suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, Australian casino billionaire James Packer and Hollywood movie director Brett Ratner are exhausted. They look like two hungover frat boys after a hard night—but these guys haven’t been partying. They’re jet-lagged after visiting Russell Crowe’s film set in South Australia, watching Chinese tennis star Li Na win the women’s Australian Open in Melbourne and toe-touching in the Philippines to open Asia’s first Nobu restaurant at a new casino resort in Manila. It sounds like a pleasure cruise from Packer’s earlier life as…

Reuters – Chinese gambling fever has crossed the East China Sea. Shares in Lippo jumped 36 percent after a consortium including the Hong Kong-listed property group won approval to build a large-scale casino in Korea. The prospect of luring punters from northern China explains the excitement. But just as in the gambling hub of Macau, investors may be pushing their luck. The news appears to have caught investors by surprise. The consortium of Lippo, Singapore’s OUE and Las Vegas casino operator Caesars had a previous application to build Korea’s first foreign-run gambling resort rejected last year. When it’s opened in…

Wall Street Journal – Macau gambling company Galaxy Entertainment Group said Wednesday that it recently signed a framework agreement to build a 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) resort on a nearby island China hopes to transform into a thriving city at the heart of the Pearl River Delta. Unlike Galaxy’s megaresorts in Macau, which has ballooned into a $45 billion gambling market, this project wouldn’t have a casino. The rationale for building the resort, the first such project set to be built by one of Macau’s six casino operators, is to complement Galaxy’s business in the territory, differentiate it from…

The Telegraph – With 43 varieties of pillow, 150-year-old bottles of cognac and breathtaking, neon-lit views, no expense is spared for high rollers at the Las Vegas of the East. At the entrance to the Galaxy casino, elegant Filipina glamour models usher gamblers past a giant model diamond into a world of palm-lined artificial beaches and £48-a-time cocktails. This is Macau, a former Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast that in just over a decade has become the undisputed global king of the casino. It is also a world of money laundering, corruption, human trafficking and over-indulgence that stands in…