Lawrence Ho (何猷龍), the billionaire owner of Melco Resorts & Entertainment Ltd, said he favors building a casino in Osaka rather than Tokyo because there are more opportunities to develop the smaller Japanese city as an entertainment destination.
Ho is among the industry heavyweights seeking entry to Japan after Japanese lawmakers voted in December last year to open the country to casino gambling.
The government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which made casino liberalization a priority, has not decided where those casinos will be built, nor which companies will operate them.
Photo: Bloomberg
The prize could be the world’s most lucrative casino market, which CLSA Ltd estimates could generate US$25 billion annually.
While Melco is considering the viability of Tokyo and nearby Yokohama, the company’s top choice is Osaka and the surrounding Kansai region, home to attractions such as Universal Studios Japan and the city of Kyoto, famed for its Buddhist temples.
“When you go to the Kansai region, it’s more fun, really, and we’re a company that focuses on fun and entertainment,” the 40-year-old Ho, who also serves as chief executive officer, said in an interview at Melco’s City of Dreams resort in Macau.
Melco is competing for Japanese licenses with rivals that include Las Vegas Sands Corp and MGM Resorts International, both of which are focusing on Tokyo and Yokohama in addition to Osaka.
To be selected, operators and municipalities will have to team up and submit a proposal to the government, according to guidelines published this month.
“MGM’s business model is to build large-scale destination resorts with lots of stuff that cost a lot of money,” MGM Resorts global development executive vice president Ed Bowers said this month. “So it needs to be in a high-density population area.”
The Tokyo metropolitan area is home to about a third of Japan’s people.
That popularity is what makes Tokyo less than optimal for hosting the type of integrated casino resort popular in Las Vegas and Macau, Ho said. Those facilities typically include hotels, entertainment options, shopping and convention centers.
“I’m not so sure Tokyo needs an integrated resort,” Ho said. “Tokyo by itself is amazing. It’s like when people ask me: ‘Do you think New York and London need an integrated resort?’ No, they don’t.”
About an eight-hour drive from Tokyo, Osaka is a prime shopping destination and a favorite for tourists from China. Although both cities are front-runners to be selected by the government as casino locations, Tokyo’s higher costs might be a deterrent.
“Tokyo’s inflated commercial land prices are higher than the rest of Japan,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Margaret Huang and Carmen Lee wrote in a report on Friday. “That may dissuade casino operators from developing an integrated resort there, even with the city’s population and infrastructure.”
CLSA’s US$25 billion revenue estimate is based on the country having two urban integrated resorts and 10 regional casinos. By comparison, gaming revenue in Macau last year was US$28 billion, while Las Vegas generated US$6.4 billion.
Gaming companies interested in Japan are still waiting for lawmakers to vote on proposals establishing rules on taxation and regulation, and addressing ways to combat gambling addiction.
Until then, Melco is busy courting potential partners, Ho said.
That can lead to some awkward encounters as the foreigners target some of the same Japanese companies.
“Right now, there is a lot of speed dating,” Ho said. “Sometimes, I go into a Japanese corporate’s office, and then I walk out and I see our competitors in the lobby.”
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS