VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: Las Vegas is the World’s Gambling Capital

EDITOR'S NOTE: Every Monday, a new edition of "Vegas Myths Busted" is released, along with a bonus Flashback Friday edition.  The first edition of today was published on December 4, 2023.

Few Las Vegas regulars are aware that Macau, a Chinese city, has been the world's gambling center for 15 of the past 18 years, suggesting that what happens there also seems to stay there.

In 2006, Sin City started to rank second in terms of yearly gross gaming revenue (GGR) after Macau, the sole gambling-friendly city in China, briefly overtook it with $6.95 billion in GGR compared to $6.69 billion for Vegas. The distance has largely increased since then.  By the year 2019.

Macau's reported yearly gaming income of $36 billion was almost six times that of Las Vegas, which claimed $6.6 billion.

Because of this, the business that was formerly owned by the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson now only conducts business in Singapore and Macau.  despite continuing to refer to itself as Las Vegas Sands.  The corporation reportedly paid $6.25 billion to Apollo Global Management and VICI Properties for the sale of the Venetian, Palazzo, and Venetian Expo properties in Las Vegas last year.

Money  Macau

On the coast close to Hong Kong, Macau (often spelled Macao) was formerly a Portuguese territory.  After being retaken by the Chinese in 1999, it became the new Wild West for casino growth after Stanley Ho, the late "King of Macau," and his family's stranglehold on gaming concessions ended in 2002.

Due to Macau's designation as a "special administrative region," China permits gambling there even though it has been prohibited on the mainland since 1949.

In 2004, Las Vegas Sands opened its first casino there. Two years later, Wynn Resorts followed, then in 2007, MGM Resorts.  Together, they spent $20 billion building VIP suites, massive casinos, and opulent hotels to satisfy the mainland Chinese's voracious hunger for gaming.

“For investors, one of the big lures is that, on average, the city’s gambling tables pull in about seven times more money than tables in Las Vegas,” the New York Times reported in 2007. “The winnings are a testament to how serious the gamblers are in this part of the world, despite the fact that income per person in China averages just $1,700 a year.”

By 2019, 66% of Las Vegas Sands' business and 70% of Wynn's came from Macau.  (MGM did not provide a breakdown of its yearly income by nation.)

The Technicality of the Pandemic

Only on a technicality did Las Vegas reclaim its position as the global center of gaming from 2020 to August 2023.  Beijing's "zero COVID" policy, which imposed stringent, weeks-long COVID-19 quarantine restrictions, severely reduced Macau's tourism from 39 million tourists in 2019 to 5.9 million the following year.

Beijing's concurrent assault on junkets, which are planned tours that assist high rollers in avoiding capital regulations and transferring substantial quantities of money from Macau to the mainland, further exacerbated the harm.

With its lowest yearly total in 25 years, $7.87 billion, Las Vegas edged ahead of Macau, which saw its $36 billion in gaming income in 2019 decline to $7.56 billion in 2020.

In January 2022, Macau lifted all quarantine restrictions, and in August 2022, travel to China was once again free of quarantines.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Macau already regained its position in the first half of 2023 when its gross gambling income surpassed Las Vegas' $7.5 billion for the same time, coming in at almost $10 billion.

This tendency is unlikely to reverse again, barring another epidemic.