Inside Asian Gaming

5 10 cus is 100% on gaming machines. No tables, no hotel rooms, no retail. We focus on that; we build our membership loyalty – which takes time. It’s growing. They are playing the same Aristocrat machines.Why are they play- ing here? Because they know this guy, they know this attendant, they know this floor manager.” Mocha offers conveniently located out- lets throughout Macau and aims to “accom- modate the needs of serious gaming ma- chine players.” Chan also argued the huge expansion in Macau’s slot capacity could benefit the entire market by promoting “leisure gambling” in a city long-dominated by hard-core table-gam- ing.Mocha’s parent company,Melco PBL Enter- tainment,will install 3,000 machines at its flag- ship City of Dreams mega-resort, scheduled to open in 2008 on the burgeoning Cotai Strip, along which Las Vegas Sands Corp is spear- heading the development of“Asia’s Las Vegas,” anchored by its Venetian Macau property. Biggest slice of the slot pie Las Vegas Sands’ Sands Macau has the third highest average daily slot win, at US$181 per unit per day in the fourth quarter of 2006. With 1,233 slot machines, Sands Macau earned more than US$20 million in slot reve- nue in the quarter.Through Sands Macau, Las Vegas Sands had a commanding 27% share of Macau’s US$76 million slot revenue in the fourth quarter. In May 2004, Sands Macau became the first foreign-operated casino to open in the city following the official ending of Stanley Ho’s casino monopoly at the end of 2002. At opening, Sands Macau featured just 277 gaming tables and 405 slots. In the wake of continuous expansion,Sands Macau now has 230,000 square feet of gaming space con- taining 740 tables and 1,254 slots. Seeing the light As the largest casino operator in the city, al- though Stanley Ho’s Sociedade de Jogos de Macau controlled almost 40% of Macau’s installed slot machine base in the fourth quarter of 2006, the machines were largely located in unappealing monopoly-era prop- erties, and trailed the market in terms of av- erage daily win. Even Sociedade de Jogos has now begun courting the mass market, however, in view of what Stanley Ho recent- ly decried as “cutthroat competition” in the VIP sector. In February, Sociedade de Jogos unveiled its new flagship casino, the Grand Lisboa, featuring five floors of plush casino space with 240 gaming tables and 484 slot machines. The company is likely to see its average win per slot start to rise as revenue figures from the Grand Lisboa come in, and later, as the company starts to phase out some of its cramped and dingy monopoly- era properties. By Kareem Jalal. Reprinted with permission from Slot Manager magazine. The Wynn Macau casino