Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | October 2010 36 Cambodia B order casinos have a long and in some cases illustrious history. What is Macau if not a collection of glorified border casinos, initially serving Hong Kong and now open for business with mainland China? Macau has followed Las Vegas in embracing big business and leaving its gangster-tinged Wild East roots behind in favour of earnings conference calls and weightings in investor portfolios. But there are in Asia still plenty of operations true to the swashbuckling traditions of cross-border gambling. Cross-border casino business can be seen as the ultimate expression of the laws of supply and demand in legal trans-national trade. For it to flourish, a number of conditions must be in place. One is that gambling must either be illegal or restricted for the nationals on one side of the border. The most obvious example is the cross-border casino trade between Macau and the Chinese mainland. There are also border casinos in Vietnam (for example Laocai International Casino on the banks of the Red River opposite Hekou in China); Laos (such as Savan Vegas resort on the Lao-Thai border) and Myanmar (small operations mostly located on the border with China in the regional states of Shan and Katchin. But the daddy of international-standard cross-border casino proliferation in Asia is Cambodia. It has the good fortune, if that’s the right phrase, of sharing borders with Vietnam and Thailand. The former has casinos but limits entry to foreigners or Vietnamese with foreign passports. The latter bars casinos completely. In the second quarter of this year, Cambodia had 26 casinos scattered along its extensive borders with Vietnam and Thailand. And more are planned. Entertainment Gaming Asia, formerly Elixir Gaming Technologies, announced at the end of May that it had been granted a casino licence by the Cambodian government for a project, dubbed Dreamworld Casino and Resort, in Takeo Province, near the Vietnam border. Dreamworld is slated to include a casino and hotel on more than seven acres (30,000 square meters) of land. Cambodia’s border casinos are country cousins compared to the slick multi-billion dollar offerings created in Macau. But they do represent a significant amount of capacity for the regional industry. If each casino had only ten tables and 20 slots, that’s still 300-odd Borderline Case Chronic oversupply of properties could threaten Cambodia’s frontier casino trade Poipet Siem Reap Phnom Penh Takeo Bavet CAMBODIA Thailand Vietnam