Question of the Day - 08 January 2008

Gambling generates $10.6 billion per year for Clark County as a whole (approx. $8.2 billion for the Strip, downtown, and Boulder Strip), but with the expansion of other revenue streams, including high-end restaurants, designer shopping malls, expensive entertainment, and massive convention business, the trend in recent years has been toward gambling revenues being replaced, to a certain extent, by other sources of income. In fact, Las Vegas' non-gaming revenues currently total $28.8 billion per year.

In terms of how the city’s revenues break down, we don't have our hands on exact figures for Las Vegas as a whole, but we can give you stats for some individual properties and major casino corporations, which remain the dominant revenue earners in this town, plus some other relevant data, which together should give you a good idea.

• The Venetian is one of the properties that fits perfectly into the 40% model. If you include the Sands Expo Center, a subsidiary of the Venetian’s operating company Las Vegas Sands, in 2006 approximately 40% of the property’s income derived from gaming and 60% from non-gaming sources, including hotel rooms and food and beverage, a reflection of the Venetian’s emphasis on convention and trade-show business, which also means it tends to have high room occupancy even during mid-week periods.
• On the subject of conventions, the city now hosts approximately 24,000 of them per year, which represent a non-gaming economic impact of more than $8 billion.
• In 2006, Wynn Resorts' revenue broke down as follows: 50% casino; 19% food and beverage; 18% rooms; and 13% entertainment, retail, and other. These figures reflect the combined revenues of the Las Vegas and Macau properties, which means that the income from gaming in Las Vegas alone is probably less than 50%, the stats being skewed by the casino in Macau, where gambling remains the biggest earner among the hotel-casinos (few guests currently stay more than one night in the island's resorts).
• According to its annual report, in 2005 Station Casinos, a group catering essentially to the locals market, depended on gaming for approximately 76% of its gross revenues, with food and beverage accounting for 13.5% and rooms just 5.6%. Revenues from other miscellaneous sources contributed a little under 5%. But this was before the high-end Red Rock Resort opened, which has, presumably, altered those statistics somewhat.
• For MGM Mirage, which owns and operates 10 Strip resorts, we only have figures for the company as a whole, which owns another seven casinos/resorts outside of Las Vegas, plus 50% shares in investments in four other properties in Nevada, New Jersey, Illinois, and Macau, and interests in other gaming and non-gaming enterprises around the world. Still, with the bulk of the corporation’s income still coming from Las Vegas, the overall figures should be a fair reflection of how those properties’ revenues break down, which in 2006 comprised just under 44% ($3.1 billion) from gaming. Almost 28% derived from rooms, about 20% from food and beverage, 6% from entertainment, 4% from retail, and 6% from "other."
• Boyd Gaming owns and operates nine casinos in Nevada, plus six others around the nation and 50% of the Borgata in Atlantic City. Like Station Casinos, in Las Vegas the company's properties mainly cater to the locals market. Hence, it's no surprise that 74% of its revenues derive from gaming, with 14% coming from food and beverage, 7% from rooms, and 6% from other sources.

So, now you know.