Thanks to the Golden Week holiday, Macau set a record for monthly gaming revenue in October, rising 42.3% over Oct. 2010. According to the jurisdiction’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, Macau’s year-to-date numbers are even more impressive. The Asian gambling enclave recorded revenues of MOP 221.2b (US $27.65b) in the first 10 months of 2011 — a 54.4% gain over the MOP 152.1b reported by this time last year.
Las Vegas Sands (LVS) does quite well in Macau (and Singapore), but chairman Sheldon Adelson has been playing his Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” card (despite having been inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame earlier this week). Adelson has a beef with stock market analysts that haven’t truly appreciated just how gobsmackingly awesome his company is. Speaking to the Associated Press’ Oskar Garcia, Adelson says (we’re paraphrasing here) that Lazarus rising from the dead has nothing on LVS’ turnaround from its dark days in 2009, when its stock plunged to a mere $1.38. As LVS’ majority shareholder, Adelson claims to have personally “lost about 20-some-odd billion, but I wasn’t worried about it because I knew that the fundamentals of the companies had not changed.” With six consecutive profitable quarters and a share price now topping $48, why does Adelson feel LVS ain’t feeling analysts’ love? “We don’t have the pizzazz and the mystique.” We humbly suggest the next time Adelson appears at an industry conference, he does so in a Batman costume.
Another gaming icon, Stanley Ho, the man some consider the patriarch of the Macau gambling boom, turns 90 years old on Nov. 25. However, the aging casino magnate won’t be blowing out any candles in Macau on his special day. Having only just been recently released from hospital, Ho plans a quiet celebration in Hong Kong, according to SJM Holdings CEO Ambrose So, “but when conditions permit, [Ho] would very much like to come to Macau.” Yeah, him and the rest of the land-based gaming industry.
