The listed arm of Suncity owns 34% of central Vietnam beachfront resort Hoiana. (Photo provided by Hoiana)
Once dominant in Macau’s junket business, Suncity has fallen on hard times. Founder Alvin Chau’s late November arrest toppled its junket business and nearly that entire segment of the Macau gaming economy. Last week, the non-junket listed arm of Suncity reported a US$83 million loss in 2021, casting “significant doubt on the group’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
Amid the devastation, Vietnam beachfront casino resort Hoiana should prove Suncity’s lasting positive legacy. The listed side of Suncity owns 34% of Hoiana, a US$4 billion project soft opened in June 2020, 15 minutes drive from Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage site. As travel restrictions ease across Asia, Hoiana appears poised for success, whatever happens with Suncity.
Rush Street Gaming’s Rivers 78, in a new riverside neighborhood, is among three finalists for a Chicago casino license. Hard Rock and Bally’s have proposal similarly ambitious projects. (Graphic provided by Rush Street Gaming)
The Windy City isn’t blowing its casino opportunity. The long running saga took another turn when Chicago chose three finalists for its casino license.
The city eliminated two proposals that built on the success of its McCormick Place convention center. Instead, Chicago opted for projects that would introduce new landmarks to the urban landscape.
I’ve been urging a similar approach for New York’s downstate casino opportunity, encouraging an iconic development that makes New York City a more attractive destination for residents and visitors and maximizes new investment and employment. Adding live table games to New York’s two current downstate electronic gaming facilities at race tracks would likely dampen enthusiasm for the region’s third license and lengthen the odds of creating a casino worthy of the largest city in the US.
When it comes to casino development, downstate New York has a better hand than Chicago. But winning often depends on how you play your cards.
With high rollers increasingly scarce, Las Vegas Sands subsidiary Sands China is betting that fake London, alongside fake Venice and Paris, will bring in crowds . (Photo provided by Sands China)
Mainland high rollers can still gamble millions in Macau. Without junkets, though, they’ll have to find their own means to skirt China’s currency controls. And they’ll know exactly how Beijing feels about their activities.
From its Connecticut base, Mohegan Gaming has expanded to Las Vegas and Korea. (Photo credit: Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment)
In its first quarter century, Native American casino operator Mohegan Gaming and Entertainment has expanded from its Connecticut base to Las Vegas and Asia. In an exclusive interview, MGE president and CEO Ray Pineault, the second Tribe member to lead its gaming arm, talks about those milestones and the Mohegan vision that looks 13 generations ahead.
A single New York City casino license may produce a gaming changing entertainment destination like Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands. (Photo credit: Marina Bay Sands)
A multibillion dollar casino complex in New York City would give the region a much needed economic jolt in the wake of Covid. But if New York State issues the three casino licenses permitted by law for the downstate metro area, New York City won’t get a showplace integrated resort worthy of the leading US market. A single license is New York’s best bet for tourism, business and jobs.
In this year brimming with loss, the two most consequential teachers of my college years passed away. Historian Donald Kagan and urban planner Alexander Garvin were towering figures in their chosen fields and fixtures at Yale for decades.
Garvin and his bowties took the train up from his day jobs in New York City government under five mayors to teach Study of the City on Tuesday nights. In the wake of Watergate and amid mounting evidence of New York’s municipal dysfunction, Garvin’s class demonstrated a useful role for the public sector. I earned my first A in that class, writing a term paper comparing two NYU housing blocks south of Washington Square Park. Later I lived in that neighborhood, and then in Washington’s Capitol Park South, the first US urban renewal area, a fact I learned in Garvin’s class.
Thanks to Garvin, I also began a career in government. I don’t remember the circumstances but I must have reached out to him, and in June 1978, he gave me my first real job, surveying damage from New York’s summer of ‘77 blackout along Broadway in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As I learned in the Department of City Planning report that incorporated that fieldwork, every borough in New York has a street named Broadway that starts at the its waterfront.
Trying make government work for the people took me across the border into Queens, working with retailers on Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood, to the municipal markets that Fiorello LaGuardia launched to get pushcarts off city streets, to Queens Borough Hall, to Washington and to Tanzania as a US diplomat telling America’s story to the world.
I needed a job back in 1978 thanks in part to Donald Kagan. As a freshman, I got steered to Kagan’s introduction to ancient Greek history, a subject I knew nothing about. At the first lecture, in an auditorium with hundreds of students, it was a clear within minutes that I was in the presence of a truly gifted scholar and teacher. Kagan’s Origins of War course, about what ignited the Peleponnesian War, Second Punic War, World War I and World War II, and what kept the Cuban missile crisis from become a war, made history alive, contemporary and relevant.
Kagan inspired me to attempt multiple majors including classic civilization. I even went to summer school to try to learn ancient Greek.
When my triple major dream crumbled at the end of my junior year, I approached Kagan with a different idea. I asked for his approval to complete my senior paper over the summer and graduate early. Kagan, who thought more of my newspaper work than my scholarship, agreed to oversee my paper and arrange the administrative details, saving my family about $6,000 in tuition.
Like me, Kagan was a working class kid from New York who drank the Yale Kool-Aid. Kagan shuddered at the prospect of something ruining such a uniquely blessed place, the way the Athenians had destroyed their own. He didn’t want to see that happen to Yale, and he didn’t want to see it happen to America.
His attitudes could be a bit ancient. He left Cornell because he believed it knuckled under to student protest demands for a Black Studies curriculum. He opposed the option to allow undergraduates to take up to four to their required 36 courses as Pass/Fail, rather than for a grade, to stop the “unmanning of Yale students.” His turn as dean went sideways over a proposed new Western Civilization curriculum that was more well endowed than received.
Conservative to his core, Kagan believed in preserving the essential values of society and passing them down the generations. Garvin believed tearing something down could lead to building something better. Their teachings and their kindness have helped shape my life.
Suncity’s Hong Kong listed arm, which excludes its junket business but holds stakes in casino properties Hoiana in Vietnam and Tigre di Crystal in Russia plus a casino hotel under development in Manila’s Entertainment City, says Chau plans to resign as its chairman and CEO.
My ICE365 article on Genting’s licensing in Nevada while discounting its Philippines business highlights how regulators around the world have perfected the art of diminishing, if not disregarding, inconvenient facts. In Macau, at least for now, the authorities have lost their blinders when it comes to Suncity. This story has barely begun to unfold.
Amid pandemics of Covid-19 and disinformation, truth and fiction are this year’s odd couple.
This year, Felix Unger Day arrives as we enter approach a third calendar year with the Covid-19 pandemic. So much that was once commonplace and taken for granted has become a major effort if not a distant dream. It’s a situation that seems too strange to be real. Combining this reality that’s stranger than fiction with the epidemic of falsehoods presented as facts makes truth and fiction an apt odd couple for 2021.
Japanese authorities have made creating integrated resorts a mountainous task. Photo credit: JNTO
Hopes of creating the next big thing in Asian gaming skyrocketed as Japan began moving toward casino legalization in 2013. That enthusiasm has dissipated over these past eight years for a variety of reasons, and the smart money now bets building integrated resorts in Japan for billions of dollars won’t pay off.
I’ve been part of the negative wave that’s swept the Japan casino contest, due to culminate in the national government licensing up to three IRs next year. I’ve suggested that Japan stop the IR process to rewrite the rules and that authorities only award one IR license among the three current contenders, hoping for more attractive candidates to emerge later.
Caesars’ return to Japan – it dropped out the bidding at the time of the Eldorado purchase – is a reminder that Japan remains the world’s third largest economy, and it boasted rapidly growing international visitor arrivals pre-Covid. It’s also a reminder thatdefying conventional wisdom about Macau remade the global casino business two decades ago. Japan could have similar impact, despite what the smart money says.
Muhammad Cohen 