MACAU BUSINESS Southside story Besides Boten and Ton Pheung at its
northern tip, Laos has two casinos in its southern half. About 60 km outside Vientiane, Dansavanh Nam Ngum Resort is admired for its lakeside location and picturesque golf course. The casino, opened in 2008, has about 60 tables and 150 gaming machines. Dansavanh is a home-grown resort chain and runs a shuttle service to Nam Ngum from its
hotel in Vientiane. Savan Vegas, a partnership between Macau-
based Sanum Investments, Lao backers and the government, is billed as the country’s first five-star hotel and entertainment complex. About 450 km southeast of Vientiane and with road and rail links to Thailand, the casino has 90 tables and 450 machines. Savan’s casino manager Eric Coskun says an expansion is scheduled for later this year. The
difficult to see similar quantum of investment; without these factors I can’t see another Macau being created,” HSBC senior gaming analyst Sean Monaghan says.
Trading places
Macau may fall short of the standards some global sophisticates expect, but it is worlds ahead of Boten and Ton
Pheung. Laos border SEZs have a single casino each, limited accommodation and rows of shops in garage-like structures selling goods you could find in the mainland. Amenities are on the drawing board but may never progress. Moreover, the area’s previous attractiveness as an
ecotourism destination is being undermined by rubber plantations and other SEZ projects. Mainland travellers describe the SEZs as “China ten years ago” and an “eyesore”. Management can potentially address these situations but it can’t do much about geography. Mr Monaghan places “location next to Guangdong province” at the top of his list of factors for Macau’s success. Laos is next to Yunnan province, which has just half the population and 2 percent of the GDP of Guangdong, the mainland’s wealthiest province, 1,400 kilometres away. Worse still, Ton Pheung and Boten are not just
far from Guangdong, they are also barely convenient to Yunnan and the rest of the mainland. “If you’re south of Kunming, then you’ll go
there,” the industry source says, noting that the area is sparsely populated farm country. Boten is
hotel has 500 rooms, with another 400 to open late next year. The casino relies on Thai gamblers. Junket
groups have been largely supplanted by burgeoning mass market and direct VIP play. Lao nationals are prohibited from gambling at all four casinos, but they can play at six slot clubs on the borders with Thailand and Vietnam. Sanum operates four slot clubs and plans at least three more.
12 hours by road from Kunming, while Ton Pheung is another three-and-a-half hours southwest on the Thai border. Yet Ton Pheung focuses on Chinese customers, with Thai gamblers reportedly urged to play out their stakes and leave. “Even if you could convince junkets [from beyond
Kunming] to come here, there’s no way to get them here,” the source adds. The only airport in the region is 45 minutes from Ton Pheung and three hours from Boten, offering only a handful of domestic flights each week. International connections are via Laos’ capital
Vientiane to the south, which has its own casinos, albeit oriented toward Thai gamblers (see the report below). “If you’re getting on a plane, you’ll have to go to Vientiane, but then you might as well go to Guangzhou and across to Macau,” the source said.
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