Not that much if you're MGM Mirage and trying to leverage your brand recognition into Mainland China. Toward the tail end of his most recent earnings call, MGM Mirage CEO J. Terrence Lanni said the company had made an erroneous assumption that "because MGM is a known name because of our former sister company, the [film] studios, that people would flock there in the mass market and the slot area ... frankly, those people may recognize the studio but they didn't recognize the fact that there was an MGM Grand hotel casino, if you will, in Macao."

So all those Chinese watching pirated DVDs of Stargate SG-1 (and selling them on eBay) aren't making a connection between Leo the Lion and the MGM/Pansy Ho pleasure palace on the South China Sea. Lanni estimates MGM's share of the Macao market at 8%, putting it in last place behind -- and these percentages are approximate, based on the best available figures -- Galaxy Entertainment (11%), Wynn Resorts (17%), PBL Melco Entertainment (18%), Las Vegas Sands (22%) and Stanley Ho's SJM (24%).

Which would mean only seven percentage points now separate fading frontrunner SJM from relative newcomer Wynn (which has but one property to Ho's 19), and Wynn itself has already gotten taken down a peg by PBL Melco's Crown Macau. As for getting a larger slice of that pie, MGM is putting its focus on mass market/slot players "because that's where the real margins are."

Wall Street sets too little store by the fable of the tortoise and the hare, but ... has MGM's being the last entrant into the Macanese market hurt it? Macao players can be fickle, given the right incentives, but did MGM lose the first round of the customer-loyalty war by being so late to the battlefield?

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