Interview SHELDON ADELSON
will feed into the premium mass and VIP markets.
Macau has penetrated around two per cent of the Chinese market so far, which is calculated upon a pre- sumption that all of the visitation only comes once per year - and we know that’s not true.
“We got lucky in Singapore” The competition for the Singapore licence had an archi- tectural component to it in which they said 20-30 per cent of the decision would be based on the architectural element. So we went with a brilliant architect, Moshe Safdie, who does things that are really iconic. When he came up with the bridge on the top, the Skypark wasn’t in the original idea (Adelson has revealed that at the raising of the platform he planned to ride it to the top - the same way, as he described “that the guy rode the bomb in that movie (Dr. Strangelove).” However, after we finished the design, I had to give final approval to it and I said it didn’t have a swimming pool. He said, well, to tell the truth, you don’t really need a swimming pool and I don’t have any place to put it - we used up all the land. So I said put it on the roof. Of course there are hotels with swimming pools on the roof. He thought it was a good idea. Now I didn’t ask him to build the whole Skypark - I thought we could have two elevators up the two outside buildings with a pool in the middle and
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vaguest could walk over a pedestrian walkway between the buildings. I didn’t think he was going to build what he did (In May 2006, Adelson's Las Vegas Sands was awarded the licence to construct a casino resort in Singapore's Marina Bay. The new casino, Marina Bay Sands, opened in 2010 at a rumoured cost of $5.5bn. In 2013, Adelson earned a top ranking on Forbes' Annual 'Biggest Winner' List, his dramatic growth a result of the success of his casinos in Macau and Singapore, adding an estimated $15bn to his net worth during the single year).
I do believe in iconic buildings when you’re in a compe- tition. I saw the design for MGM’s proposal for Osaka and thought it was a beautiful design, but could it be considered to be iconic? To me an iconic building is the Sydney Opera House in Australia, where if you looked at the picture you know exactly the city in which it is located. So all of our presentations for buildings in future markets will be iconic buildings. It’s kind of like when young architects come out of school and they get a job at the architectural firm and they take a design out of their back-pocket and say, hey boss - I’ve been dreaming about this - this is he greatest building we could ever do. The boss then looks around for the round file cabinet - he takes it and throws it into the cabinet, saying nobody will build that… that’s an iconic building.
Only universities and museums can afford to build an iconic building and only someone as crazy and risk-tak- ing as a Sheldon Adelson can build an iconic building for the billions in costs to win the day. It’s one thing to build an iconic building here on the Vegas Strip, it’s another to build an individual iconic building in an emerging mar- ket. When I’m talking to the mayors and the governors, or however I’m talking to about a new project, I hint that your grandchildren will say to their cohorts in schools that my granddaddy was the mayor responsible for building that building.
Stable in Bethlehem You have to scale down in places like Bethlehem (Pennsylvania, US - the Sands Bethlehem casino opened in May 2009, table gaming began operation on July 18, 2010 and the hotel opened May 27, 2011), but only to a certain extent; with any MICE location (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions) strategy you have to have so many square feet of meeting rooms to sleeping rooms. If you’re building a MICE proposal you can’t have five meetings rooms, you need to build 500. When came up with idea that I couldn’t get the Spanish government to agree to - I finally got one of the local governments to agree, but then the EU wouldn’t have allowed it. I was going to build 2,400 meeting rooms, that would have been the convention capital of the world -
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