China’s Las Vegas and its ‘maverick’ Irish

To get to the island of Taipa your cab might take you over an undulating 3km bridge whose outline is intended to trace the shape of a dragon, the night sky above illuminated by the lights of the casinos that have made Macao the world’s gambling capital.

Macao, which lies 65km west of Hong Kong, across the South China Sea, was a Portugese colony until 1999. Now, like Hong Kong, it is an autonomous “special administrative region” of China. It is also inordinately wealthy, thanks to the casinos that sit on Taipa and on Macao Peninsula, which with Taipa’s fellow island of Coloane form the territory of Macao.

Down Old Taipa’s warren of cobbled streets a Dubliner named Niall Murray has set up Prem1er Bar & Lounge, where he showcases Irish whiskies and craft beers to discerning tipplers. Prem1er has a speakeasy feel, and is in sharp contrast to the glitz of the big casinos nearby.

You can’t tell from the buzz on the ground and the blazing neon, but Macao’s winning streak is cooling, with the money from the green baize hit by slower economic growth, capital flight and a crackdown on corruption in mainland China.

So in places such as Prem1er a small group of Irish gaming gurus, managers and entrepreneurs are spearheading efforts to turn around the fortunes of the former colony, the only place in China where casino gambling is legal – and which makes four times more from gambling than Las Vegas does.

“Macao certainly has had a great run. The revenues were so high and so amazing for so long, but now they are not growing 30 or 40 per cent every quarter and are going in the opposite direction,” Murray says.

He has worked for some of the biggest gaming companies in the world, cutting his teeth at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and working at Sheldon Adelson's Sands casinos and at Sociedade de Jogos de Macau, or SJM, a gaming company owned by the local kingpin Stanley Ho, the father of gambling in Macao.

“People now have to look deep and hard at every penny they are spending and, at the same time, comply with the government’s request to include more nongaming options. This is a time of big changes in Macao.”

Not far from here, at the Sands on Cotai Strip, the piece of reclaimed land that has joined Taipa with Coloane and now hosts a string of casino resorts, the tables spread out across the floor, some empty, some packed, as people follow the money.

But it’s not among the regular punters that Macao’s slowdown is being felt. It’s among the high rollers, who would come to Macao in groups of eight or 10 and drop hundreds of thousands of euro. In some casinos just 12 tables brought in nearly 90 per cent of the revenue.

Those rich gamblers have fallen foul of the austerity of the Xi Jinping era in Beijing, the crackdown on corruption by government officials. Macau’s casino gross gaming revenue rose 1.1 per cent year on year in August, to about 18.8 billion patacas, or €2.1 billion, the first time in 27 months that it did not contract. Nobody expects a fast turnaround, but things are looking more positive than they have for more than two years.

Macao hosted almost 31 million tourists last year, which was a drop of 2.6 per cent on the previous year – but is still remarkable for a territory of fewer than 600,000 residents. Tax revenue from gambling generally accounts for more than 80 per cent of Macao government revenue.

Maverick nature

Murray was a driving force behind Macao’s Irish Chamber of Commerce, which opened in 2012. The Irish are playing a key role in meeting the challenge of turning Macao around.

Ian Coughlan, a Co Clare man, is president of Steve Wynn’s Macao operations; Frank McFadden, from Belfast, heads business development at SJM.

Efforts to encourage Irish people to come to Macao have been boosted by the recent appointment of Peter Ryan as Consul General to Hong Kong, where his brief includes Macao. He has worked hard to boost Ireland’s profile there.

Gaming is one part of the mix driving middle-class tourism in China, but it’s not the main part. The newly rich middle classes want entertainment, an international experience and great food.

“That is the next evolution. People don’t see Macao as a gambling trip,” says Ciaran Carruthers from Rathcoole, in Co Dublin, who is senior vice-president and director of operations at the Sands-owned Venetian in Macao. “The thing for me about Macao – even more so 14 years ago, when I came – was the Wild West nature of it, the maverick nature. That’s always been of great interest to me, the nature of the business and the pace at which it’s grown, how closely linked we are to the changes in China and the vagaries of the economy there.”

The Venetian is the world’s largest casino and the seventh-largest building in the world, spread over 980,000sq m of floor space, with 3,000 hotel rooms and 800 tables – as well as gondoliers who sing opera as they push you along Venetian-style canals.

“In my line of work there is nowhere in the world you’d rather be. And the people who have stuck around since the early days, you had to have that sense of the maverick about you,” he says.

Also on Taipa is the Irish Coffee House, which along with the Irish Pub is owned by Glenn McCartney from Belfast.

McCartney is another founding member of the Irish Chamber of Commerce, has been the UK’s honorary consul in Macao since 2004, and is a tourism lecturer with an expertise in gaming tourism. When we meet he puts down a packet of Barry’s Tea and a copy of his latest article in the Gaming Law Review and Economics journal, which addresses the downturn in Macao’s casinos, including the junket system under which agents guarantee to bring high rollers to VIP tables in return for a slice of the revenue; the gamblers are lured in part by free travel and accommodation.

“We are challenged in Macao to find a sustainable future,” McCartney says. “There is an incremental downturn, and everybody is impacted in Macao, because everybody, directly or indirectly, benefits from the gaming industry.

“Ninety per cent of our GDP is gaming and hospitality, the only place in the world where that is number one. In Ireland hospitality is 8 or 9 per cent. We don’t have another industry here to fall back on.”

Well into his second decade in Macao, McCartney headed east after selling a stereo to buy a ticket to Hong Kong in 1996. Deciding not to take up an offer at an accountancy firm, he went into event management instead and, a couple of years later, gravitated towards what was then a sleepy enclave just a ferry ride away.

“The mood and the swing of Macao was very low momentum. The whole Portuguese cultural thing was very nice. The pulse was much slower than Hong Kong, and that suited me.”

Foreign investors

Back then the only player in town was Stanley Ho and SJM; Ho’s Casino Lisboa, dating from 1970, was the main gaming venue. That quickly changed after the market was liberalised, in the early 2000s, and the city’s government began offering casino licences to foreign investors.

Big Las Vegas names started to come in: Sheldon Adelson opened Sands Macao in 2004, and Steve Wynn opened a casino shortly afterwards. Suddenly Macao’s gaming revenue was threatening to outstrip Las Vegas’s.

That soon happened, and Macao slot machines and tables still earn multiples of the sums generated by their Las Vegas counterparts, but those multiples are falling; June’s gaming revenue of €1.8 billion compares to €479 million in Nevada.

“I’ve been saying since 2005 that gaming wasn’t going to be enough,” McCartney says. “Casinos should be treated as a tourism product and regulated as such. I was at the horseracing in Hong Kong. It was a fun day out. That’s what casinos should be about.”

Changing fortunes in China may have stacked the odds against Macao for now, but the Irish in the world’s casino capital are betting on this being a transition phase. Fresh jackpots are out there.

This report was supported by the Global Irish Media Fund. Next week: the Irish in Singapore