The Small and Medium Enterprises Association (SMEA) is urging the Macau government to downsize the scale of the city’s gaming industry.
Stanley Au, head of SMEA, said that the decline in Macau’s gaming revenue is attributable to China’s corruption crackdown, which drove high rollers away from the gambling hub and Au maintains that new casinos won’t restore the gaming industry to its former glories.
In May, Galaxy Entertainment Group launched its Galaxy Macau Phase 2, the first new major resort Macau welcomed in three years and arrived in a time of relative scarcity. This was followed by the opening of Melco Crown Entertainment’s $3.2b Hollywood-inspired Studio City in October and this is just the beginning…
A host of new casino projects is scheduled to open in the next few years. The $4.1b Wynn Palace will open in four months’ time. Sands Chin’s $2.7b Parisian Macao has an April 2016 launch target (although the company has warned that the launch may not happen until the second half of 2016). MGM Resorts International makes its Cotai debut next year with a $3b casino resort while SJM’s Lisboa Palace is set to open in 2017.
But Au told TDM that “the new casino effect will not bring any good, and in contrast, I believe new casinos will bring deficit to the gaming corporations. Gaming companies were too ambitious when building the new casinos in Cotai. They shouldn’t have been built.”
Au also released a whitepaper calling on the government to give SMEs different policies than the gaming industry.
“When the virtual economy [such as gaming] faces difficulty, they have less revenue and need to downsize. Their imported laborers should return home. However, the real economy [small and medium enterprises] suffers from manpower shortages. We should be allowed to import workers,” said Au.
Aside from being dependent on migrant workers, SMEs also face challenges in hiring workers as it struggles to top market salaries in casinos. Most of the businesses had to raise the salaries of its existing employees by 4%–6% this year and some may give an extra 10% to workers performing well, said SMEA vice president Daniel Iong.
