Melco Crown Entertainment is on track to open its long-awaited fifth hotel tower at the City of Dreams casino resort in Macau—a $1 billion project that will offer gaming starting 2018, the casino operator announced on Tuesday.
MCE CEO Lawrence Ho said his company will be moving gaming tables from its other existing operations in Macau to one floor of the new hotel, which they named Morpheus.
The tower, designed by late architect Zaha Hadid and named after the God of Dreams, will also feature some 780 rooms, restaurants, an executive lounge, a sky pool and VIP gaming and villas at the top floors, the casino operator said in a press release.
“There’s one floor of Morpheus, and I think it’s going to be a few VIP [gaming] tables or a few premium mass tables,” Ho told Macau-based reporters.
The executive implied that the soon-to-open hotel will accommodate the tourists that will enter the special administrative region through under-construction infrastructures, such as the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.
“The casino portion is not a new casino [but] merely moving some casino tables… from existing facilities to Morpheus [as] it’s still part of City of Dreams,” Ho said, according to Macau Daily Times.
The Melco Crown chief executive noted that they are looking at developing Morpheus into a global brand.
“Morpheus is really a hotel tower and the one floor of gaming is just [involving] the moving of some of the mass tables or whatever, to that area. So it is not a separate casino,” said Ho, according to GGRAsia. “And in terms of VIP business, I think Melco Crown has always been not very reliant on VIP – less than 5 percent of our EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation] comes from VIP.”
“As a company, we are focused on growing premium mass, and that’s always been the case. I think we are, in the whole of Macau, the second-least reliant on VIP… I’m happy that it [Macau’s VIP business] has recovered, but I think the driver for Macau and for Melco Crown for the years to come will be based on mass,” Ho noted.
MCE’s original flagship Macau property City of Dreams saw its revenue fall 7 percent to $621 million in the third quarter of 2016, but its VIP turnover showed a rare sign of health as turnover shot up 14 percent.
