Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2010 36 SJM I n the red hot gaming market of Macau, the mass-segment live tables in SJM-licensed casinos in the ‘midtown’zone, Taipa, appear to be significantly underperforming in revenue terms. Some VIP players may find sufficient motivation to trek to Taipa, but mass-market customers are thin on the ground. In gaming terms, Taipa is something of a dormitory settlement no man’s land across the water from the Macau peninsula and on the way to Cotai. The SJM-licensed Taipa casinos—Greek Mythology (New Century), Macau Jockey Club Casino and Grandview—between them have about 200 tables. That’s only just over 4% of Macau’s live table inventory, but nearly as many as there are in SJM’s directly managed flagship property, Grand Lisboa. Those tables could go a considerable way to boosting SJM’s profitability if at least some of the mass tables were reassigned to busier floors on the peninsula. Taipa’s table inventory is an important resource, because the number of live tables in Macau has (in theory at least) been capped by the government at 5,500 until the end of 2012. There were already 4,828 of them out there in the market at the end of the second quarter of this year, according to Macau’s gaming regulator, the DICJ. What slim quota is left will be fought over by Galaxy and Sands China for their new Cotai resorts. Both those operators seem to be under the impression they have each been given an allowance of 400 new tables for the first phase of their Cotai projects. If phase one of Sands’ Cotai 5 and 6 opens before the end of 2012 as the company seems A Tale of Two Cities Taipa’s SJM-licensed casinos are underused, but SJM doesn’t mind Sands China’s Cotai 5 and 6