Las Vegas-type construction boom heading for Macau

According to US News, the former Portuguese colony of Macau in China is set to see a frenzy of construction in casino resorts. Two Las Vegas gambling corporations have received gambling licenses and will develop resorts in the former Portuguese colony on a scale similar to the Las Vegas strip building boom of a decade ago.

Las Vegas Sands Inc. is already building a 170,000-s.f. casino and has announced plans to construct a series of 20 resorts totalling more than 50,000 rooms. Wynn Resorts have also been given a gaming license. One of the hotels Las Vegas Sands intends to build will be a half-size replica of the Venetian resort in Las Vegas in Macau.

Macau is the only fully-fledged legalized gambling location in Asia and already crowded with tourists and undergoing extensive redevelopment. The resort is within a five-hour flight of three billion people, half the world’s population.

Before 2002 Hong Kong billionaire Stanley Ho had a monopoly on casinos. According to the newspaper reports, the existing casinos are “dark-panelled parlours jammed with gamblers five deep, and slot machines in corridors so squalid they resemble bus-station hallways.”

Macau consists of two islands and a compact peninsula off the Guangdong mainland into the South China Sea. The area is undergoing extensive redevelopment, including plans to merge the two islands with a massive reclamation project called Cotai City.