The managing director of International Game Technology (IGT) Asia in Macau, Scott Winzeler, is optimistic about the opportunities for his interactive gaming machines, and has been quoted as saying that once the new casinos start business on the Cotai strip the market could see a rollout of a network of gaming machines linked across Macau, similar to the "wide area progressive games" pioneered by IGT in Las Vegas in the 1980s.

Although wide area progressives, that use jackpot systems to combine their win pools from thousand of gaming machines across casinos to allow multi-million dollar payouts for lucky players, will command the slot onslaught on the gaming floor, other jackpot systems and gaming devices will also influence growth. According to Winzeler, IGT's target is to see three game machines for every table in Macau.

At the Asian Gaming Expo in Macau last week, Marc Falcone, managing director of Deutsche Bank research, said that he expected a steady 20% growth in the gaming market in the coming years, with the number of casino tables in the world's largest gaming economy growing four to five times by 2008, and expecting the number of slot machines to rise from 2,600 to 15,000-20,000 by the end of the decade.

Falcone said the average length of stay for visitors in Macau was about 1.2 days but once Macau becomes a "destination gambling environment" with attractions and shopping malls the length of stay would increase, with visitors filling thousands of hotel rooms, which can be booked online, in high profile casinos such as Melco's City of Dreams and Venetian Macau. Additionally, the expert also expected other smaller gambling destinations across Asia, such as Singapore and the Philippines, to benefit from the gaming energy bouncing off Macau.

With the hotel and gaming equipment manufacturing industry expecting to get a boost once the announced projects, worth some US$8-10 billion, are completed in the next five years, the US$5.4 billion Macau gaming market, which has already overtaken the more famous Las Vegas strip on gambling revenue, will surely move to a higher gear to hit top spot overall.

Andy Nazarechuk of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has predicted that Macau would get 40 million visitors a year by 2010, and expects the spin-off benefits to be a surging property market in the region, along with a higher demand for luxury goods as the number of jobs grows and people's wealth increases. If Nazarechuk is right, then the number of slots in Macau is likely to be closer to those in Las Vegas, which expects to reach 43 million visitors by 2009, and exceeds Falcone’s estimate by far, as the Las Vegas slots-tables ratio is over 30/1. (E-06.20.05)

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