Inside Asian Gaming

November 2013 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 17 IN FOCUS turned the equivalent of HK$34,000 in sales per square foot last year, so it’s all relative. The point is that affluent China’s love affair with France and the luxury brands associated with it, well-documented as this is, presents an enormous opportunity that has not been lost on Sands China or its Las Vegas-based parent, as plans for the heavily themed Parisian (a freestanding half-scale Eiffel Tower among them) suggest. The Chinese are everybody’s favorite tourists, good for US$85 billion in overseas spending last year, according to ChinaDaily . But for the outbound China traveler spending more than US$10,000 per trip, France is the preferred destination, even ahead of the US. Shanghai’s Hurun Report , probably the best-known of the many chroniclers of the Middle Kingdom’s boom in high net worth individuals, ranks the country’s shoppers first in the world in terms of average spend. “Tourism reigns supreme as the number one leisure pursuit for China’s wealthy,” Hurun says, and shopping is foremost among the “deciding factors” that shape their plans, selected by 58% of HNWIs surveyed, above “culture, local cuisine” and “business potential”: this is according to the magazine’s “The Luxury Chinese Traveler,” an annual report, now in its third edition, compiled in partnership with International Luxury Travel Market, a division of Reed Exhibitions (G2E, G2E Asia) that brings elite buyers and sellers together at invitation-only events in places like Cannes and Mexico’s Riviera Maya. Las Vegas Sands posted shopping mall income after expenses of US$328.2 million last year on $396.9 million in revenues, 60% of which was generated at Venetian Macao, Four Seasons Macao and Sands Cotai Central. It worked out to 82 cents of operating profit on every dollar. The Grand Canal Shoppes at Venetian Macao In terms of spend, the report finds Chinese travelers accounting for 24%of all tax-free purchases processedbyGlobal Blue, a venerable service that provides VAT and GST refunds mostly in Europe and in Japan and South Korea. At roughly US$1,200 on average per trip they buy more than Americans, Russians and Japanese combined, and their rate of expenditure grew by 50% last year compared with 30% worldwide.