Macau gambling heir Lawrence Ho (何猷龍) is looking to expand his empire to Taiwan as it ends a decades-old ban on casinos — but not if it risks upsetting China.
In an interview with AFP, the 31-year-old son of Macau gaming tycoon Stanley Ho (何鴻燊) said he was enthused by the approval by Taiwan’s legislature on Monday of a bill allowing casinos to be built on its offshore islands.
“Subject to the credit market, we are very interested,” the chief executive officer of Melco Crown Entertainment said. “I have given a few speeches in Taiwan. We’ve looked at that market quite a bit extensively in the past few years.”
But he said that good cross-strait relations were crucial.
“Our relationship with China is key to us, we wouldn’t want to do something to piss them off,” he said in English, adding that Taiwan’s internal politics would also be a factor.
Ho said Japan was another big Asian market that interests him, but that he would ensure any expansion would not hurt his gaming business in Macau, which will remain his base.
Ho’s company, a NASDAQ-listed joint venture with Australian entertainment tycoon James Packer, is one of six concessionaires allowed to operate casinos in the southern Chinese city.
His competitors include US giants Wynn and Las Vegas Sands, Sociedade de Jogos de Macau (SJM) run by his father, and MGM Grand Macau, a joint venture between his elder sister Pansy and Vegas firm MGM Mirage.
Like his rivals, his six-star hotel Crown Macau was hit after Beijing last year tightened visa restrictions on mainland visitors to Macau, who constitute the bulk of their customers.
It resulted in a 10 percent drop in Macau’s gaming revenues for the third quarter last year, official statistics showed.
But Ho said he believed the city’s economy would rebound after hitting the bottom in the fourth quarter and China would relax its visa policies over the next few months.
“We are very bullish,” he added, speaking after announcing on Tuesday that his US$2.1 billion entertainment resort, City of Dreams, would open as planned in the second quarter of this year.
His company will recruit 7,000 people over the next few weeks.
“It is not the worst time in the world to open a new property,” he said. “We are the only large-scale construction that’s still opening in Macau. So we will have the best pick” of the labor.
The project, centered around a casino with 550 tables and 1,500 machines, is nearing completion on the Cotai Strip, where Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands has Venetian Macau and Four Seasons.
Ho said City of Dreams — which, apart from the casino, will count several hotels as well as restaurants, shops and a lavish entertainment venue — would complement its gambling-focused neighbor.
Ho — who says he never gambles — is often seen as Macau’s next “gambling king” after his father, who for four decades enjoyed a monopoly in Macau until the government liberalized the gaming sector in 2002.
“He’s very, very flashy ... I am pretty boring,” the younger Ho said. “I am very fortunate to be his son. He has so many roots here, just being his son has opened numerous doors.”
But he said he never wanted to work in his father’s companies, and what he learned was “away from his company.”
IN GOOD FAITH: Lai said he appreciates Micron’s commitment to Taiwan and that it would continue expanding its investment in the country, while also working with labor President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday called for US memory maker Micron Technology Inc and its workers to negotiate “sincerely” ahead of a possible strike by the company’s union in Taiwan. Last week, a Taiwanese union representing workers at Micron said it had secured authorization from its members to strike over a dispute concerning the company’s bonus scheme, escalating a labor conflict at the chipmaker’s largest manufacturing hub. Micron employs about 15,000 people in Taiwan and has said it invested more than NT$1.6 trillion (US$49.6 billion) in the country. Speaking in Taichung at the opening of a new Micron advanced assembly and testing facility,
China proposed adding advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to its export-control list, potentially restricting overseas transfers of AI models and chip designs in an effort to keep closer control over homegrown advancements in a strategically important sector. The draft proposal covers 23 AI technologies, including large language models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters. Restricted technologies would include model weights and source code for products exceeding certain performance thresholds. Chinese AI startups have this summer made significant progress in closing the gap on US industry leaders. Models such as Moonshot (月之暗面) AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s (深度求索) latest editions offer better pricing,
Taiwan should not rule out any energy source or abandon environmental sustainability in favor of ideology and short-term benefits, President William Lai (賴清德) said in an interview, calling for a “professional assessment” of whether nuclear power should be reintroduced into Taiwan’s energy mix. In an online interview with influencer Yu Ting-hao (游庭皓) that aired yesterday, Lai reiterated his position on nuclear power. SHIFT Lai’s remarks marked a shift from the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP’s) longstanding opposition to nuclear power. As premier from 2017 to 2019, Lai pushed for more gas-fired power capacity while sticking to the DPP’s nuclear free homeland ideology and rejected the
JUST FOR SHOW: The new-generation sports car, which would not begin production until 2028, finally gives Tesla a showpiece after years of missed Roadster deadlines Tesla unveiled a redesigned Roadster powered with rocket-style thrusters on Thursday and said it would start production in 2028, more than a decade after it first showed a next-generation version of its electric sports car. The white two-seater vehicle, developed in collaboration with CEO Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, drove upside down on a ramp using a suction system, turned in the air and landed using built-in thrusters. Later in the event it used the thrusters to jump over a truck and other vehicles, twisting in the air during the maneuver. Some watchers saw the collaboration as Musk drumming up interest in
RSS