Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | January 2014 10 COVER STORY Source: John D. Kasarda and Taoyuan Aerotropolis charm going for it and spectacular natural beauty and that’s been about it since the ColdWar military garrison pulled out a decade ago, taking with it most of what there was by way of an economy. When its inhabitants went to the polls in the summer of 2012, it was with hopes for a brand of magic the pro-casino camp had had three years since Penghu to get better at conjuring. It was still a tough sell. The margin was 420 votes out of about 3,000. The difference was Weidner Resorts and its founder and chief executive Bill Weidner. The former president of Las Vegas Sands arrived on Matsu with an enormous reputation as the executive who’d made LVS a force on the Las Vegas Strip and who’d opened Macau and Singapore to the Western gaming industry. The spot his company has selected on a coastal promontory on Beigan, one of the two main islands, calls for 2,000 hotel rooms and an array of entertainment and lesiure attractions, the first phase of a cluster of planned resorts ultimately housing 26,000 rooms. Mr Weidner predicts 1 million visitors in his first year of operation, 4.5 million after five years, 70% of them from the mainland. That’s a lot of consumers for a place whose tourist numbers don’t top much above 100,000 a year, only about 7,500 of them from China. He has said he has commitments from a consortium of banking giants for around US$2.5 billion, a substantial portion of which also will be dedicated to bringing Matsu’s primitive infrastructure into the 21st century. This will include a ferry harbor and a bridge to the other main island of Nangan and electrical generation andwater-treatment facilities and an expansion of Beigan’s single-runway airport. “I don’t see any problems that cannot be solved by modern technology,” he’s told them. He’s also promised to build a university to train the islanders to fill the 5,000 jobs (70,000 at full build-out) he says he’ll create. But his clincher may have been the promise of a monthly stipend for every resident—NT18,000 inYear 1 ($600), increasing to NT80,000 ($2,667) by Year 5. It’s difficult to imagine what all this must sound like to people who live with almost no commerce at all, not a supermarket or department store, not a hospital or clinics or even doctors except those serving the military. It will be at least five years before they see any of it, though. That’s the time frame observers posit for completing the land deals and getting the transport and power infrastructure up to speed. “We optimistically expect that the earliest time the casino could open to public in Matsu is around 2019,” says Lin Kuo Shian, director-general of the department that oversees gaming for the Transportation Ministry. The much-hyped Taoyuan Aerotropolis—the gateway to Taiwan’s economic future, as the government trumpets it, is a sprawling high-tech mega-city 45 kilometers from Taipei, 4,500 hectares in size.