Las Vegas Sands sets its sights on Indian casinos

Posted on | August 29, 2008 |

Las Vegas Sands, a US company with the biggest casino portfolio in Macau, may spend $12bn (£6bn) on a strip of casinos in India, chairman Sheldon Adelson announced today. But Mr Adelson, speaking to reporters gathered for the opening of the new Four Seasons hotel on the Special Administrative region’s Cotai Strip, said any development in the sub-continent would require the explicit backing of the Indian government.

India currently has only four legal casinos, all of them in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, although plans have just been announced for a new casino at an existing hotel in the northern Sikkim province owned by the Mayfair group.

The recent slow down in the US and European economies has led Las Vegas Sands to invest more than $15bn (£7.5bn) in casino projects in Singapore and Macau, itself a former Portuguese outpost, and now the only place in China where land-based casinos are legal. Las Vegas Sands’ biggest rival for the burgeoning casino market in Asia is another American giant, Wynn Resorts Ltd.

On his way to Macau, Mr Adelson stopped off in India, meeting the ministers of tourism and trade. Today he would not reveal details of their discussions.

The Cotai Strip, modeled on the Las Vegas Strip, sits on reclaimed land between Macau’s Coloane and Taipa Islands and Mr Adelson plans to build as many as 14 hotels there by 2013. The Four Seasons will be part of a complex offering more than 1m sq ft of gambling space, 3m sq ft of shops and almost 21,000 hotel rooms.

Las Vegas Sands opened Macau’s first foreign-owned casino in 2004, ending billionaire Stanley Ho’s 40-year monopoly of the city’s gambling market. Mr Adelson ranked 12th in Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people this year, with a personal fortune of $26bn (£13m).