Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming January 2015 34 Feature Vegas and Atlantic City. In the Northeast, the nation’s most competitive market, dozens of casinos or slot parlors operate or are opening, in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island—and soon Massachusetts—as well as Atlantic City, where four of the city’s 12 casinos have closed this year and it is feared that a fifth will soon be turning out the lights. Connecticut’s two tribal casinos, Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, have also fallen on hard times, stricken in the years since the Great Recession by overexpansion and layoffs. “New York City aside, after all the current casino development commitments are met in [the Northeast], I think we will be close to a zero-sum game,” Mr Rittvo says. “Any gaming expansion beyond these projects in the region will lead to a market share shift, not real growth.” NEW YORK STATE OF MIND Concerns about saturation have figured prominently in the thinking of the Gaming Facility Location Board charged with recommending where to site the four new Las Vegas-scale casinos authorized by New York’s Legislature and backed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo as an economic development tool. The resorts, which would include boutique hotels, spas, luxury restaurants, golf courses and other amenities, are expected to provide thousands of jobs in distressed parts of the state and, according to one estimate, generate more than $300 million in new tax revenues. New York is already home to five tribal casinos upstate and nine slot parlors at racetracks, and last month, the board chose to recommend only three of the four projects to give those chosen a better chance of success. It rejected six applications in Orange County, the region closest to New York City, in favor of a single resort in the Catskills, a long-faded holiday destination for city dwellers in the more economically needy county of Sullivan directly to the north. Several major developers, including a US subsidiary of Malaysia-based casino giant Genting Group, along with Caesars Entertainment, Hard Rock and Mohegan Sun, were shut out. In all, 16 applicants vied for licenses. The other two approvals were granted to projects near the state capital of Albany in the upper Hudson River Valley and in the center of the state in a region known as the Finger Lakes. “For 50 years, the Sullivan County Catskills have sought gaming as a way to grow our tourism-based economy,” said state Sen. John J. Bonacic, a Republican whose district includes much of the Catskills. “And now that moment is here.” Genting, however, may have been the biggest winner after all. The resort conglomerate controls four publicly traded companies, three of them with gaming portfolios stretching from Southeast Asia to the UK. Plans also call for a multibillion-dollar resort on the Las Vegas Strip. A US subsidiary operates the sole gambling hall in New York An artist rendering of the completed MGM Resorts casino project in the western Massachusetts city of Springfield The other casino development hotbed in the Northeast is Massachusetts, but unlike New York, the gaming development players in this market have been largely settled. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission has already awarded two of its three allowed licenses.