Adelson: Sore winner; Good news from Atlantic City

Macao’s 2013 casino haul of $45 billion seems pretty mind-boggling on its own merits. That number could be $115 billion by 2018. Much of that growth will be driven by post-2015 projects of Melco Crown Entertainment and Galaxy Entertainment Group. The latter has land sufficient to build at least two Cotai Strip megaresorts. Melco also has new product in the pipeline. But Las Vegas Sands, when it finishes Parisian, will be out of land.

Reuters caught Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson in a crabby mood. “I was the visionary. I filled in the swamp and the bay, and was the first company to build there. There is not enough land left anywhere in Cotai to catch up to the number of hotel rooms that [Sands China] has. Galaxy doesn’t have enough land to even equal our Sands Cotai Central, which has 6,000 rooms,” Adelson fumed via e-mail. (So he does use computers, after all?)

At least Adelson can take comfort in knowing that Sands China’s 2013 revenues outgrossed the Las Vegas Strip. It’s also the darling of Wall Street, with 22 of 25 analysts rating it a “Buy” or “Strong buy.” More serious worries are governmental limitations on table-game inventory and on dealers. The quota of the latter can’t keep pace with casino growth, but there’s strong local pressure to keep the jobs at home instead of importing mainland Chinese to man the tables. At least the casinos can shuffle their tables around among multiple properties but even they can’t conjure dealers out of thin air.

Online-gambling revenue helped brake Atlantic City‘s slide, with Internet revenues of $10 million contributing to a much smaller decline last month. Once lost business from the Atlantic Club Hotel is factored out, A.C. casinos were down but 1.5% on a same-store basis. Several posted significant gains. Caesars Atlantic City was up 6%, Resorts Atlantic City rose 11%, the Tropicana jumped 21% and the Golden Nugget leapt 26%. By contrast, Trump Plaza fell 25%, to a miserable $4 million gross and Trump Taj Mahal was down 24%. (Somebody remind me please how valuable Donald Trump‘s name is?)

Revel Resort posted a 21% gain, although — at $11 million — it still grossed less than the lowest-performing Caesars Entertainment property, the Showboat ($12 million, -16.5%). Despite incrementally less table play and a modest increase in slot revenue, Borgata revenues were 2% lower last month. Citywide, slot revenue fell 4% on lower handle and table revenues fell 15%. But the headline item may be the Nugget, moving toward the middle of the pack and past Resorts, Revel and Showboat, among others. Tilman Fertitta could make a go of it in Atlantic City yet. As for online gambling, it didn’t generate significantly more than January (in a shorter month) and the market share remains essentially the same, with Caesars picking up a point from Boyd Gaming, 31% to 40%. March will probably give us a truer test of online play’s growth.