By Kate O’Keeffe
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
HONG KONG (Dow Jones)–A company controlled by Angela Leong, the fourth wife of gambling mogul Stanley Ho, said it will invest 10.4 billion patacas (US$1.3 billion) in a casino-less, family-oriented theme park and hotel resort in Macau’s Cotai area.
Leong, a member of Macau’s legislative assembly, is also an executive director of SJM Holdings Ltd. (0880.HK), which is controlled by Ho and is Macau’s largest casino operator by revenue. A spokeswoman for SJM said Friday that the project “is not related to SJM.”
The news comes ahead of China Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to Macau this weekend and amid surging gambling revenue in the Chinese territory despite local and Beijing officials’ calls for Macau to diversify its economy away from the lucrative business.
Macau’s gambling revenue in the January-October period has risen 59% from a year earlier to 152.11 billion patacas (US$19.05 billion), forcing repeated and significant analyst forecast upgrades.
Leong’s plans also come as several casino operators await land ownership rights for projects in Cotai, and as Sands China Ltd.’s (1928.HK) current US$4.1 billion casino expansion project faces unspecified delays due to a labor shortage because of the Macau government’s crackdown on imported workers. Leong’s office didn’t immediately return request for comment.
Her project will feature six hotels with 6,075 rooms in total and amenities such as shopping malls, restaurants, convention facilities, amusement park rides, an indoor beach and wave pool, theater and an equestrian center, Macau Theme Park & Resort Ltd. said in a statement Thursday. The development should attract an additional 2.5 million tourists per year and lengthen the average length of stay in Macau, it added.
The resort, which will open in three phases, will take between seven-and-a-half and nine years to build and will require 7,500 construction workers, and up to 9,000 employees once it is fully operational, the statement said. The 200,000-square-meter site is next to the Macau East Asian Games Dome in Cotai, which is home to enormous casino resorts such as Sands China’s Venetian Macao.
Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd. (1398.HK) is so far the only financier for the project, which has secured 1 billion patacas to date, according to a Macau Daily Times report.
The statement didn’t say when construction would begin or how the company would acquire sufficient workers in Macau’s labor-starved market to build such a large project, an issue that has plagued casino operators such as Sands China and Galaxy Entertainment Group Ltd. (0027.HK). Sands China’s parent company Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS) said in its third quarter report issued Tuesday that “until adequate labor quotas are received, the timing of the completion” of its latest expansion project “is currently not determinable with certainty.”
The resort will feature a casino and 6,000 hotel rooms as well as a theater and retail, entertainment, dining and conference facilities.
Ambrose So, SJM’s chief executive, said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires in September that he expected land rights for Cotai casino projects would be granted to his company, Wynn Macau Ltd. (1128.HK) and MGM Macau by the end of 2010.
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