Casino Owners Part2.
In Part1 you have seen the biography of Stanley Ho.
Now, we take a look at one of the American casino owners Sheldon Adelson.
At present, Sheldon Adelson is the richest among the casino owners of the world. He owns the corporation “Las Vegas Sands“, which controls the casino-hotel “Venetian” in Las Vegas, the Venetian Macao and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
The life of Sheldon Adelson is a classical story of an American dream. Sheldon Adelson was born in 1933 in the Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston in a poor Jewish-Ukrainian emigrant family. His Lithuanian-born father was a taxi driver and an advertisement salesman.
He had to work since early childhood. He made his first money by selling newspapers as a street boy. He started a business selling toiletry kits, and in the 1960s he started a charter tours business. Sheldon Adelson went to college at the City College of New York, but dropped out to venture into business.
Despite having limited formal education, this self-made man, soon became one of the best financiers in the United States. He worked as a mortgage broker, investment adviser and financial consultant. Through his work as a financial advisor, he helped to improve the financial situations of more than 50 companies.
From the 1970s, Adelson lived in Massachusetts with his wife, Sandra, and their three adopted children, Mitchell, Gary and Shelley. They divorced in 1988. Mitchell died of a drug overdose in 2005.
Sheldon Adelson met his current wife Miriam Ochsorn on a blind date in 1989 and married after two years of courtship in 1991. Miriam Ochsorn is an Israeli physician specializing in drug abuse treatment.
As an entrepreneur, Sheldon Adelson believed in the future of IT technologies. The international show-exhibition of IT-technologies “COMDEX” was his brainchild. The computer trade show COMDEX, which he and his partners developed for the computer industry was the original source of Sheldon Adelson‘s wealth. The first show was held in 1979. It was the premier computer trade show through much of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1995, Sheldon Adelson and his partners sold the Interface Group Show Division, including the COMDEX shows, to SoftBank Corporation of Japan for US$862 million.
Sheldon Adelson first entered the casino industry in 1989 by taking over the casino-hotel “Sands” in Las-Vegas from Frank Sinatra. In order to bring to Las Vegas a new source of business from the exhibition industry, he decides to transform Las Vegas into the international business centre, with view to attract rich entrepreneurs and convert them into potential players to his casino. The following year, Sheldon Adelson and his partners constructed the Sands Expo and Convention centre, then the only privately owned and operated convention centre in the United States.
Venetian Las Vegas
In 1991, while on honeymoon vacation in Venice with his second wife, Miriam, Sheldon Adelson found the inspiration for a mega-resort hotel. He renovated the Las Vegas Sands and invested one and a half billion dollars to construct The Venetian, a Venice-themed resort hotel and casino. In 2003, The Venetian added the 1,013-suite Venezia tower – giving the hotel 4,049 suites; 18 leading-chef restaurants; a shopping mall and all this at the background of Venetian channels, with gondolas sailing and gondoliers singing their famous songs. The new casino was targeted not only at ordinary players, but also at wealthy businessmen who came to his new business centre. As many experts acknowledge, “Venetian” is one of the most beautiful casino-hotels in the world.
In 2004, Sheldon Adelson spearheaded a major project to introduce Sands into Macau, the Chinese gambling city that had been a Portuguese colony until December 1999. Sheldon Adelson opened the casino “Venetian” in Macao, the first casino of Las Vegas type in Asia. The one million-square-foot Venetian Macao became the People’s Republic of China’s first Las Vegas-style casino when it opened in May 2004. Sheldon Adelson made back his initial US$265 million investment in nine months and, he increased his wealth when he took the stock public in December 2004. Since the opening of the Venetian Macao, Sheldon Adelson‘s personal wealth has multiplied more than fourteen times.
Venetian Macau
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Even though Cotai was a marsh swampy land, Sheldon Adelson visualized the creation of Cotai into an Asian counterpart of the Las Vegas Strip. In August 2007, Las Vegas Sands opened the US$2.6 billion Venetian Macao, a supersized version of its Vegas namesake with 3,000 rooms, a million square feet (93,000 square meters) of convention space, an 800,000 square foot shopping mall, and the world’s largest casino. In August 2008, Las Vegas Sands followed up its expansion plans by opening the Four Seasons Hotel next to the Venetian in Cotai.
The next project is Sands Cotai Central, originally slated to open in 2009 but mothballed due to the global financial crisis of 2008 that pushed Las Vegas Sands to the brink of bankruptcy.
“The opening of Sands Cotai Central is a game-changer for the future of Macau as a leisure, entertainment and business location,” Sheldon Adelson said. “Having changed Las Vegas to a city of convention, business and leisure tourism, we’re going to make Macau a city of convention and leisure tourism.”
Sands China, a company registered in Hong Kong is a subsidiary of Las Vegas Sands. Sands China owns and operates the US$4.4 billion Sands Cotai Central casino resort project. Opened on the 11th April 2012, it is the biggest piece of the world’s largest tourism development project.
Sands Cotai Central as the anchor point of the Cotai Strip is the pathway to adventure, fun and fortune. Boasting of the three celebrated hotel brands of Conrad, Sheraton and Holiday Inn, Sands Cotai Central offers visitors to the Cotai Strip a spectacular range of affordable luxurious facilities with about 6,000 hotel rooms and suites, and 1.2 million square feet of retail, entertainment and dining amenities, and meetings and convention space. Shoppes Cotai Central offers nearly 100 retail outlets two spas, three health clubs and 300,000 square feet of gaming space in two, uniquely-themed gaming centres.
Along with Sands China’s Venetian Macao and Four Seasons Macao hotels, they’ve been built on what was formerly unwanted marshy swamp linking Macau’s outlying islands, Coloane and Taipa.
Sands China has successfully transformed the Cotai marshy swamp into the look and feel of Las Vegas strip. Driving into the Cotai strip, you will be welcomed by the Galaxy’s Asian fantasy palaces, then the Gothic Venetian, the sparkle and shimmer of City of Dreams, and the blazing video boards of Sands Cotai Central.
Las Vegas Sands really knows how to think big, plan and expand. A new Macau casino on a plot called Parcel 3 is slated to be Sands’ biggest project in China since it opened its US$4 billion Sands Cotai casino on the 11th April 2012.
Sands China reported that the local government in Macau extended the deadline for completion of Parcel 3 by three years, to April 2016, for an unspecified penalty. The company has reportedly already spent nearly US$97 million on construction and land costs at the site.
If the company had not been granted the extension, it could have lost its land rights and the investments already made, US$96.7 million, according to Las Vegas Sands’ 2011 annual report. Sands China is expecting to pay the government a penalty fee for the construction delay, according to a company announcement. The new Parcel 3 will be connected to The Venetian Macau and Four Seasons Macau. Sands China spokeswoman said that the casino developer was behind schedule because it had been focusing on another project—the US$5 billion Sands Cotai Central, a casino resort on the Cotai Strip that opened on the 11th April 2012. Cotai as a strip of largely undeveloped, reclaimed land badly needed the investment from the casino operators to draw more of the Chinese tourists in order to boost the Macau’s revenue. According to official data, Macau earned up to five times the gambling revenue of the Las Vegas strip in Nevada.
In May 2006, Sheldon Adelson‘s Las Vegas Sands was awarded a hotly contested license to construct a casino resort in Singapore’s Marina Bay. The new casino, Marina Bay Sands, opened in 2010 at a rumoured cost of US$5.9 billion. It includes a shopping mall, convention centre, and 2,500 luxury hotel rooms.
Marina Bay Sands
The latest news is that Sheldon Adelson said he plans to spend US$35 billion on a mini-Las Vegas strip in Spain, where he is courting the country’s two top urban areas, Barcelona and Madrid, with plans for a casino complex.
“We are looking at 12 integrated resorts, 3,000 rooms each. A mini Las Vegas, about half the size of the Las Vegas strip in Spain for the European market,” said Sheldon Adelson. “Each building would cost between US$2.5 billion and US$3 billion and target customers are from western and eastern Europe.”
As of march 2012, Sheldon Adelson’s wealth is estimated at 24.9 billion.
