A rush of theme park construction across Asia that will result in new homes for Mickey Mouse, the Monkey King and Hello Kitty is also providing a financial lifeline for the world’s elite group of entertainment designers.
New theme parks, resorts and casinos are scheduled to open from Singapore to Seoul over the next several years as property developers and entertainment companies aim to draw Asia’s rapidly growing middle classes. They’re betting there will be a big market for family amusement rides, live shows and the chance to pose for a picture with Snow White.
The projects represent the next big growth area for skilled and experienced designers and creators as the North American market has become saturated and opportunities to design big new resorts have dried up.
“America has slowed down and Asia has kicked into higher gear. Especially China and Macau are really busy,” said Gary Goddard, a veteran architectural designer who drew up the masterplan for the Galaxy Macau, a US$1.9 billion casino resort that opened in the southern Chinese city in May.
Goddard and many of his competitors are based in Southern California, but they have been doing a lot more traveling to Asia lately to work on projects and meet potential clients. Many aren’t strangers to the region, having worked in Japan on an earlier generation of parks and developments. Now the focus is shifting to China.
Theme parks in the US struggled last year, with modest attendance gains as the economy eked out a muted recovery from recession. Six Flags Entertainment Corp, which runs 19 parks in North America, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009 because of heavy debt.
The situation is similar in Europe, where operators are mostly renovating or buying smaller rivals. One of the few new parks planned in coming years is being built on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where officials are teaming with US film company Paramount.
The recession has also scuppered grand plans for amusement parks in the Middle East, where the vast Dubailand complex has been put on hold.
Not so in Asia.
Disney’s long-awaited US$3.7 billion park is scheduled to open in Shanghai in 2016. The Pasadena-based Hettema Group is designing a Hello Kitty park set to open southwest of Shanghai in 2014. Burbank-based Thinkwell Group is working on a Monkey Kingdom park near Beijing based on the classical Chinese epic novel, also scheduled for 2014.
Outside China, Southeast Asia’s first Universal Studios theme park opened last year in Singapore, part of a US$4.4 billion resort that also includes the city-state’s first casino. Another Universal Studios is slated to open in 2014 in Seoul, South Korea. Asia’s first Legoland is scheduled to open in southern Malaysia in 2013.
A US$2 billion, five-star hotel and amusement park slated to open in southern Vietnam in 2014 has lured Joe Jackson, father of the late king of pop Michael Jackson, as one of its investors.
“The growth of the middle class in Asia is phenomenal and will drive huge investments in theme parks in the coming decade,” consultancy Aecom said in its annual report on theme park development.
Phil Hettema, president of The Hettema Group, said he is in talks “probably every week about additional projects upcoming in China.”
Asian theme park attendance is forecast to grow to 290 million next year from 249 million in 2007, while spending in that period will rise from US$6.4 billion to US$8.4 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It’s not just theme parks that need skilled designers.
In Macau, the only place in China where casinos are legal, the Galaxy is the first of what is expected to be several new hybrid casino-resorts aimed at turning the city into a tourist and cultural destination and reducing its reliance on gambling revenues.
In Galaxy’s lobby, a fountain turns into a giant roulette wheel before a giant diamond rises out of the top. It’s a metaphor for wishing casino goers eternal luck and prosperity, designer Jeremy Railton said.
Legions of newly affluent Chinese making more trips around the country is one big factor driving China’s resort building boom, said Christian Aaen, a principal at consultancy Entertainment and Cultural Advisors.
There is also a large pool of young people who are “looking for new things to do and are starved for entertainment,” he said.
Meanwhile, China’s government is also trying to promote tourism as part of a push to boost domestic consumption. Regional governments have been partnering with private companies to build property developments anchored by theme parks that also include hotels, shops, restaurants or other services, Aaen said.
However, there are no guarantees of an easy ride. Hong Kong’s Disneyland has not turned a profit since it opened in 2005, despite being popular with mainland Chinese visitors.
Asia also has its share of abandoned amusement parks, many of which suffered because of lack of investment.
“Ninety percent of theme parks in China that are designed by Chinese companies fail,” Goddard said. He tells this to potential clients before asking them if they really want to proceed.
Part of the problem is that some developers want to do it on the cheap. Sometimes that means they want to clone famous existing parks even though they don’t have enough money, Goddard said. When projects do get under way, designers need to adapt attractions to Asian tastes. Many Asian park visitors consist of families that may include a young child and one or even two sets of grandparents.
That means extreme rides are out, said Kevin Barbee of KB Creative Advisors.
For these families, “if you have a roller coaster, the youngest is probably too short to go on and oldest ones don’t want to be spun and twisted,” said Barbee, who recently moved his office from Los Angeles to Singapore. He’s working on several new Universal Studios attractions there and is close to signing a deal on a theme park renovation in China.
Designers say another big difference is the food. In China, theme park visitors just aren’t as gastronomically adventurous as their counterparts at parks in North America.
“You can’t really have themed food. They don’t want French food or Italian food,” Goddard said, adding though that they will make an exception for hamburgers and hotdogs.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to