CITY FOCUS by ALEX BRUMMER: Macau's 24-hour party in the East
CITY FOCUS by ALEX BRUMMER: Macau’s 24-hour party in the East
As we walk the marbled floors of the Galaxy casino, where thousands of mainland Chinese men and women are stooped over the baccarat table, a whoop of delight emits from our guide, 바카라사이트추천 the LSE educated analyst Huei Suen Ng of CLSA Research.
The February numbers have come in showing that last month the winning take from the bustling Macau gaming tables came in at 20billion Hong Kong dollars (£1.6billion). It is the number Macau casino operators, 우리카지노 which now include big Las Vegas names like Wynn, MGM and Galaxy, have been waiting on.
For the first time the raw earnings of the casinos in this former Portuguese colony, now under the control of Beijing, exceeded in one month what all the casinos on America’s Vegas strip take in a full year!
On a roll: Macau has leapfrogged Las Vegas thanks to an influx of wealthy Chinese gamblers
Since the deregulation of Macau’s casinos, after the end of Portuguese rule in 1999, 온라인카지노 Macau has been transformed from a backwater dotted with a handful of brash casinos owned by the ailing, super-rich entrepreneur Stanley Ho, into a gambling mecca.It seeks to mimic Las Vegas with its glitzy high rises and luxury shopping malls replete with their own mini-Venice and gondola rides.
The earnings flow from the new casinos are so rich that a $2.4billion development can be paid for and 바카라사이트추천 hugely profitable within two years.
The Chinese love of playing the stock markets, wagering on the horses and gaming is well known. There is an in-built belief that it is the gamblers fate to challenge lady luck. And they do it with a vengeance.
Macau, a hydrofoil or helicopter ride from Hong Kong, is the place where ordinary mainland Chinese apply the same work ethic of the factory to the gaming tables.
There are few smiling faces at the tables or on the slots in Macau’s most famous bling ‘Lisboa’ casino. This is a place where prostitutes openly parade around an indoor shopping centre known locally as the ‘racetrack’.
These ordinary gamblers, who come on organised tours from all over China, are the cannon fodder for the older and more down-market casinos.The profit margin on their business is 40 per cent.
But the real prize for the casino owners are the VIPs who bet mindboggling sums. These high rollers are the factory owners, coal mine operators, financial wheeler dealers and businessmen from all over the People’s Republic who play with chips worth £10,000 each.In any one hour this gaming elite can drop as much as £400,000.
The really big guys get to stay free in large, luxury suites owned by the casinos. Some include roomlike shower cubicles in which three or four people can bathe at once.
To qualify for one of these suites the players have to arrive with upwards of Hong Kong $5million or around £500,000 and be ready to lose it in 48-hours of gambling and partying – almost always without their families.
The VIPs are rounded up and financed by so called ‘junkets.’ These are organised syndicates which procure the clients for the casinos and provide the finance.
Mainland Chinese are not officially allowed to take their money out of the People’s Republic. This is where the junkets, some of whom allegedly have Triad links, come in.
Before they leave China the prospectivegamblers make renminbi deposits with the junket’s representative in China.
When they arrive in Macau the junket offers them the equivalent credit, taking a big commission of just under 2 per cent, for the HK dollars used for gaming. Gamblers double or triple up on the credit if they are losing.
But the casino towers with their gold crowns and extravagant architecture also perform an economic function.
They allow the sub-billionaire Chinese rich to tip-toe around exchange controls.Winnings, when they come through, are translated into Hong Kong dollars, sterling and US dollars and secreted in offshore bank accounts or used to buy high value apartments in Hong Kong driving residential real estate prices ever higher.
Everyone, at the moment, looks to be a winner.The casino companies Wynn, Galaxy Entertainment and MGM have floated entities on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and in the last 18 months the shares have soared.
My host in Macau, Neptune Investment Management, is among those who have invested their China and global funds in this astonishing casino sector.
Another benificiary is the Chinese government which rakes off taxes of an astonishing 36 per cent – against 6.8 per cent in Las Vegas.
Indeed, the only brakes are applied by the government which can and does restrict travel visas and tightly controls the issue of licences for casino operators and junkets.
The social dysfunction – from prostitution to the fug of cigarette smoke which hangs heavily in the air – is tolerated because everyone, even the hapless gambler, can be a winner.