June 19, 2006 | Las Vegas Business Press | Move over, Las Vegas. Macau will soon be the casino capital of the world. That's the verdict of a June 8 report issued by Standard & Poor's. A former Portugese enclave at the mouth of China's Pearl River, Macau is one-fifth the size of Las Vegas, has one-fifteenth as many slot machines as the Strip and fewer than half as many table games. It boasts 21 casinos, many of them diminutive, disreputable and decrepit by Nevada standards.
Yet Macanese gaming revenues are expected to surpass the Strip's by the end of next year, if not sooner. First-quarter figures from Sheldon Adelson's Sands Macau show it winning $3.1 million per day. That's 3.5 times as much as the Venetian Casino Hotel Resort, also owned by Las Vegas Sands, which is building a Venetian clone on reclaimed wetlands in Macau. Visitors to Macau spiraled from 6.7 million in 2003 to 19 millionlast year and are expected to hit 37 million in 2012, according to CLSA gaming analyst Aaron Fischer, who told "Fortune" that casino revenues on pace for $6 billion this year could redouble by 2012. Other estimates include Jefferies & Co.'s bullish projection that Macau will take almost $13 billion by 2008 and. more conservatively, the S&P report forecasts $10 billion by 2011.
The Macau market area is driving these predictions. Not only do 100 million-plus people live within a three-hour drive of Macau, a billion more live no more than a three-hour flight away. That's four times as many as within a comparable radius of Las Vegas.
And Chinese tourists have the highest per-day largesse ($282 on average) of all visitors to Macau.
