Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but Lawrence Ho’s Russian casino has delayed its opening yet again.
Tigre de Cristal, the first casino scheduled to open in Russia’s Primorye region near Vladivostok, has missed several opening dates. It originally planned to open in late 2014, but that was postponed to April 2015, then May, then July, then August and then September.
The latest word is that the casino will have its soft opening on October 8, with the official opening to follow later that month. The First Gambling Company of the East (FGCE), in which the Ho-controlled Summit Ascent Holdings holds a majority stake, blamed the delays on its commitment to custom design, which has been plagued by slow delivery of materials.
Regardless of whether all the elevators have now been fitted out with their solid platinum buttons, the property held a walkthrough last weekend for delegates of the Eastern Economic Forum, which took place in Vladivostok. Some of the slot machines were reportedly even plugged in for delegates to check out.
Whenever it opens, Tigre de Cristal will have the Primorye market all to itself for a while, as the Royal Time Group doesn’t expect to have the first phase of its casino open until 2017, while NagaCorp is looking at “not later than 2018” and Diamond Fortune’s first stage won’t be ready until 2019.
In July, Summit Ascent’s corporate finance and strategy director Eric Landheer told the Hong Kong Economic Journal said Tigre de Cristal didn’t expect to suffer the current fate of Macau, which has witnessed 15 straight months of gaming revenue decline, because Tigre de Cristal ‘won’t rely on one single source of gamblers.”
Landheer said Tigre de Cristal expects local Russians to account for a good chunk of its mass market business while the property would also target gamblers in northeastern China, South Korea and Japan. Earlier this month, Landheer told GGRAsia that Russian authorities had instituted a visa regime that would allow South Koreans 60 days of visa-free access. Chinese tour groups of five or more individuals would enjoy visa exempt access or visitation for 15 days.
Tigre de Cristal will also enjoy an enviable tax situation. There’s a monthly levy on each slot machine of RUB 7,500 (US $110) and a RUB 125k charge per gaming table. There are no other gaming taxes, which Landheer says works out to an effective gaming tax rate of less than 1%. The property is also exempt from tax on non-gaming revenue until 2020. Landheer says this favorable regime will enable the company to “incentivize our VIP and mass players while maintaining relatively high margins.” But first it has to open…
