MACAU BUSINESS
I don’t understand why rumours are enough to have such a strong impact on stock prices. Look at Macau, look at Singapore, and the numbers have been nothing but amazing every single month. Where are these panic attacks coming from? It’s hedge funds and day-traders, which are
opportunists, not long-term investors. If the bad news gets around, the stock will go down so let’s spread the bad news. When the good news comes, lets help spread the good news and the stock will go up. They could be in and out in an hour to make money. In a minute, sometimes. These issues do not affect the fundamentals
of any commercial enterprise. People have not sufficiently studied in order
to talk about the slowdown in China. Over 90 percent of the Chinese visitors to Macau come from Guangdong province. There is plenty more people from adjacent provinces like Fujian and other places where visitors could come from. They are saying it is going to affect the
liquidity of the junket representatives. We have talked at length with them and they are saying there is plenty of money. It is not an issue. People are throwing money out at them.
26 DECEMBER 2011
Macau is a success story. Singapore too is a success story, but surely even you must be surprised with the numbers. Did you expect the results would be like this? No. I knew that there was an explosive
opportunity and that if the market was correctly approached it would be big, but I never knew how big. Macau brought in US$24 billion last year in
gross gaming income and this year it is bringing over US$30 billion. I never thought that we would get to that so fast. When we first came to Macau, there was only about US$2.5 billion of business. Within two years, without adding a table, without adding a chair for somebody to sit at, it doubled to US$5.5 billion. Everybody laughed at that and said that it
was due to the excitement of the Sands Macao effect creating a lot more business. It was not that.
More and more
How happy are you to have a foot in both Singapore and Macau? Very, very happy. I believe Asia has the potential for many more properties and we hope to be able to set
up a network of properties that help to feed each other. For instance, if we are going to Korea, a lot of
the very big Korean players are not going to play in their country because they want neither their social circles nor the government to see them. So, they will leave Korea and go somewhere else to play. Let’s say I am also going to Japan. The same thing with the Japanese. What will happen is the Japanese will go to Korea and the Koreans will go to Japan. The high rollers will come from other countries.
Everybody is talking about your plans for Spain. Are they still on track? Yes.
What is the situation with the project? We are in constant discussion with the
government about the local legislation and what kind of grants and incentives they will give to us. Under the present legislation in Spain, it is not conducive to develop a strip of integrated resorts like the original plan we have proposed. We are talking about 12 hotels with 3,000 rooms each. For instance, the government requires everybody who comes in to show his or her
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