Inside Asian Gaming

Oct 2007 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 29 so far contributed 4.2% of gross gaming revenues in 2007. Ken Jolly says even the rapid growth in Macau’s visitor numbers—estimated to hit 27 million this year compared to 22 million last year, largely thanks to a continue influx of tourists from the Chinese mainland— won’t significantly push up slot revenue in absolute terms in the short term. “Given the propensity of Chinese players to play on tables and bet with large amounts of money,I doubt you would see the slot rev- enue growing yet to the level you would see in the slot-table mix in other global markets,” states Mr Jolly. Brandon Schubert, creator of the finan- cial blog site Seeking Alpha, recently made a buy recommendation on stocks of the world’s largest slot machine manufacturer, Nevada-based International Gaming Tech- nology (IGT),partly on the strengthof growth potential for slots in Asia. He says though:“If you look at the history of Las Vegas, slot ma- chines took an extremely long time before