MACAU BUSINESS
By José Carlos Matias
jcmatias@macaubusiness.com
The bold game changer
The bold game changer ‘M
Sheldon Adelson had a vision and delivered. The US tycoon, who passed away recently, leaves behind a legacy of transformation in the city’s gaming and tourism industries, bringing Cotai to life and inaugurating the IR concept in Macau.
y idea was to rebuild half or more of the Las Vegas strip, to create the critical mass. I do not mind that other people are coming. I want other people to come because it validates
the critical mass nature of the development”. Sheldon Adelson’s opening words in a November 2011 interview with Macau Business shed light into his transformational vision for Macau which began to take shape in May 2004 with the opening of the Sands casino in the Macau Peninsula and more so after the Venetian Macao paved the way for a new era of integrated resorts in the Cotai Strip, a land “nobody wanted before”, as underlined by Adelson in the same interview.
Macau truly changed the fortunes of Adelson in a way that
few could have anticipated when in 2002 Venetian Macao was a managing company of newly awarded gaming concessionaire Galaxy Entertainment first and subsequently a stand-alone sub-concession of Galaxy. Conversely, Macau’s gaming, tourism and entertainment industry also changed beyond recognition in some ways following the investments carried out by Las Vegas Sands in Macau under Sheldon Adelson.
He built, they came
Back in the early years of this century, Sheldon Adelson’s press conferences drew crowds of journalists eager to learn about his new projects for the city and his business
Sheldon Adelson
development plan. A recurrent question was: “How will you have sufficient demand to meet such a massive increase in terms of supply?”. His answer echoed the whisper in the movie Field of Dreams: “If you build they will come”. And they, the tourists and gamblers came. By the millions, dozen of millions. The first hint of fast-paced transformation could be noticed on May 18, 2004, when dozens of thousands of visitors, mostly from mainland China, flocked to be among the first to enter the first foreign-owned casino in Macau’s post-liberalization era. However it was with the Venetian Macao in Cotai that
the International Resorts (IR) model was introduced, combining gaming with accommodation, fine dining, a large-scale shopping mall entertainment and the big non-gaming bet MICE industry: Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions, which was partially the raison d’etre of bringing Las Vegas Sands to Macau, taking into account the company’s successful track record in Nevada.
IR and MICE
Jorge Costa Oliveira, member of the Macau Gaming Commission for the 2002 international public tender, explains to Macau Business that “Sheldon Adelson realized that his company’s model of articulating MICE with an integrated casino gaming resort had even more potential in Macau”. This was reinforced by studies carried out by the time of the public tender, which “showed there was a significant gap between the offer and the demand of conventions facilities in Southern China”. Mr Oliveira, a former Legal Affairs Commissioner of the Macau Gaming Commission, adds that “this was one of the main reasons why Macau’s Tender Commission liked LVS’s project” and “once Adelson realized the fantastic opportunity that Macau presented to an American-based casino gaming corporation operating integrated resorts he fully committed his company to invest in Macau”. Niall Murray worked for Sands both in Las Vegas and Macau, being among the first batch of expat managers to open the Macau properties, serving as Vice President for Operations Development. Asked how will history portray Adelson in what concerns Macau’s gaming and tourism industry, Murray notes that his “unique vision for Macau and the Cotai Strip was much larger and far more ambitious than the
16 MARCH 2021
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