Popular online and mobile casino content provider iSoftBet deals with Spigo, Danish game developer, to offer casual games to its operator partners for the very first time. As iSoftBet deals with Spigo, the games will be delivered via iSoftBet’s powerful Game Aggregation Platform (GAP) to operators in Denmark, and includes titles offering single-player, multiplayer, card-based, dice-based, classic and modern games ...
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Unite Here Local 54 has signed an agreement that could see the NJ casino union return to represent workers at Hard Rock Atlantic City in the near future.
The post Union Blamed For Trump Taj Mahal Closure Welcomed Back To Hard Rock AC appeared first on NJ Gambling Sites.
Filipino billionaire Andrew Tan is digging US$2.33 billion out of his company’s pockets to fund the development of the Westside City casino strip in PAGCOR’s Entertainment City.
In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, Tan-led property developer Megaworld announced that it is allocating an additional PHP54 billion ($1.04 billion) for the development of the 31-hectare property over the next 10 years.
Tan’s property arm had initially committed to shell out PHP10 billion ($192 million) for the casino strip project in 2015.
Including the PHP57 billion ($1.1 billion) investment of Megaworld’s affiliate, Travellers International Hotels Group Inc., the group’s combined capital expenditure for the township is now at P121 billion ($2.33 billion) or 80 percent higher than the original commitment.
In a statement, Megaworld Senior VP and Treasurer Francis Canuto said they “want to tap every available opportunity” given that the current “demand is high.”
Last year, Hong Kong-listed casino operator Genting Hong Kong announced plans to open its Westside City Resorts World integrated resort in Manila’s Entertainment City in 2021.
Formally known as Resorts World Bayshore, Westside City Resorts World is projected to have at least 1,500 hotel rooms from in-house and international hotel brands and a casino that will be managed by Tan’s umbrella company Alliance Global Group.
Megaworld said it plans to construct two new homegrown hotel brands in Westside City, namely the 529-room Kingsford Hotel and the 685-room Grand Westside Hotel. Both hotels will be conveniently linked to the casino complex and will have the unparalleled views of Manila Bay, according to the firm.
Aside from the hotels, Megaworld is also building the 15-tower Bayshore Residential Resorts, and the four-tower Gentry Manor. So far, Westside City has around 4,000 units of residential inventory worth around PHP50 billion ($957.5 million).
Once completed, Westside City will also be highlighted by a luxury mall and hotels as well as a wide array of leisure and entertainment facilities.
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Tropicana NJ's $390M revenue in 2017 was good enough for second place in AC, completing a startling turnaround from when the NJ casino was at death's door.
The post Trop Near The Top: Tropicana NJ Casino’s Revival Capped By Strong Revenue In 2017 appeared first on NJ Gambling Sites.
BetterBetting, a blockchain-based, decentralised peer-to-peer sports betting system, recently announced its eagerly awaited listing on the HitBTC exchange. HitBTC, a global trading platform with multi-currency support, has been operating as a major exchange since 2013. By trading volume, HitBTC has been consistently among the top 10 exchanges (24 hours trading volume at time of press: $431,266,065 USD). The exchange has ...
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Greece is pressing forward with plans to get into the integrated resort casino business, motivated by the government’s need to ensure its international lenders keep the cash coming.
On Thursday, the Council of State, Greece’s top administrative court, approved the development plan for a major integrated resort project on the site of Athens’ former Hellinikon airport. The decision was then published in the official Government Gazette to ensure that foreign lenders wouldn’t miss the message.
Greece’s international bailout agreement calls for the government to receive another €5.7b tranche in March, on the condition that the government follows through on promised economic reforms, including the privatization of the Hellinikon project.
In Thursday’s Council of State ruling, the judges dismissed concerns that the project’s proposed high-rises violated local planning regulations, declaring that such deviations from the norm “are justified in serving the purpose of the public interest.”
In 2014, the Greek government authorized a 99-year lease for 620 hectares of land at the airport for an international consortium that includes local developer Lamda, China’s Fosun Group, which operates the Club Med tourism business, and Abu Dhabi-based developer Eagle Hills Properties.
The consortium planned an €8b integrated resort that would include a casino, high-rise hotels, luxury residences and a marina at which well-heeled gamblers could park their yachts. But Greece’s habitual legislative inertia and tangled economy have plagued the project from the start.
The consortium claims the project will, once fully developed, boost the country’s gross domestic product by a not-insignificant 2.4% by drawing in a projected 1m new tourists to the region per year.
Greece approved new casino legislation last month and Reuters reported that the government would soon hire an advisor to oversee a tender for a new casino license for the Hellinikon project.
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Following ICE, Fair Play Bets’ agreement creates stronger entertainment destinations with Quickfire, powered by Microgaming. Fair Play Bets, operator of multiple reputable online casinos, has ramped-up its world-class offering on its VegasPlay.com and DiamondWorldCasino.com casinos by launching the Microgaming portfolio of games via the Quickfire platform. This new agreement underlies Fair Play Bets commitment to offering the most entertaining casino ...
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Macau enjoyed a healthy year-on-year bump in visitors during the Lunar New Year festivities but analysts are fretting over a sudden and significant rise in the price of transit visas on the Chinese mainland.
The Macau Government Tourism Office (MGTO) announced Thursday that over 963k visitors traveled to Macau during the weeklong Lunar New Year celebration that spanned February 15-21, up 6.5% from the number who visited during the 2017 event.
The final figure is below the 10% year-on-year rise Macau witnessed over the holiday’s first four days, as the daily average peaked at 185.5k on February 18. The second last day of the holiday saw annual growth fall to 2.8%, while the final day’s figure was 1.4% below the final day of the 2017 event.
The MGTO’s standard caveat is that there’s no direct link between visitation and casino revenue, in part because many VIP and premium mass gamblers give Macau a wide berth during the holiday to avoid the teeming masses of tourists.
Sanford C. Bernstein analysts suggest the average daily gaming revenue over the first 19 days of February was down 16% from the same period in January. Should the casinos performance prove to be weaker than expected for the remainder of the month, the final revenue figure could fail to match February 2017’s total, which would snap Macau’s 18-month streak of year-on-year monthly revenue gains.
NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?
New Year’s travelers from the Chinese mainland totaled 716k, up 12.3% year-on-year and accounting for 74.3% of total visitation. So you can understand casino operators’ concern after word spread that the main border crossing from the mainland just announced a nearly sevenfold hike in the price of Macau transit visas.
On Wednesday, Portuguese-language media outlet Ponto Final reported that the customs office in Zhuhai in Guangdong province had abruptly hiked the transit visa cost from RMB50 (US$7.88) to RMB340 ($53.55). The price hike, which was reportedly due to a “policy change” by mainland authorities, took place last Sunday.
The visas in question are issued to mainland travelers who are transiting through Macau airports on their way to an international destination. But since the visas allow the bearer to spend up to a week in Macau before taking that international flight, they have been used to circumvent other rules limiting mainland residents’ trips to Macau to twice per year.
Mainland travel agents assisted in this subterfuge by agreeing to book air travel to international cities through Macau for a nominal fee, then cancelling the flight later without penalty. Studies from a few years ago indicated very few transit visa holders actually went on to visit their supposed international destination.
Ponto Final asked both Chinese and Macau officials whether the price hike reflected a desire to rein in the number of transit visas issued to mainland residents but received no answer.
The authorities in Beijing have historically taken steps to rein in Macau’s rapid-fire growth. In early 2014, when Macau’s casino market was at its all-time peak, Beijing launched a crackdown on corruption that ultimately led to Macau’s 26-month streak of monthly gaming revenue declines.
Macau has yet to regain those lofty 2014 heights, but the market has been on a prolonged hot streak. Perhaps Beijing is choosing to act now, before things get out of hand, using less severe methods, in the hope of achieving a more tempered growth. Or not.
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The US Supreme Court could decide the New Jersey sports betting case as early as March or April, but like the final verdict, the actual date is unknown.
The post NJ Sports Betting Case Closing In On Final Weeks Before Supreme Court Decides Its Fate appeared first on NJ Gambling Sites.
Last week, NJ's online gambling revenue for January 2018 was revealed, and no surprise, Golden Nugget NJ still reigns over its NJ online casino competition.
The post Golden Nugget Is Still The Leader Of The New Jersey Online Gambling Pack appeared first on NJ Gambling Sites.
After a robust start in planning the Sports Betting & Gaming India 2018 Summit, Eventus International is only a week shy from the event dates. The Sports Betting & Gaming India 2018scheduled for the 27th& 28th of February 2018 at the Park Hyatt Goa Resort & Spa is at its last week of preparing for the summit and everyone is ...
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Casino operator MGM Resorts is singing Donald Trump’s praises after a $1.4b tax break allowed the company to mask a year-on-year profit decline.
On Tuesday, MGM released its Q4 earnings report, which showed overall revenue rising 5.7% to $2.6b in the three months ending December 31. Operating income declined over one-fifth to $223m while net income hit $1.4b versus just $24.7m in the same period one year earlier.
However, that profit gain came courtesy of the Washington tax reforms approved last year, which gave MGM a $1.43b non-cash income tax benefit, boosting earnings per share to $2.42. Without that windfall, the earnings gain would have less than a penny per share.
Domestic resorts revenue improved 5% year-on-year to $1.9m in Q4. However, excluding contributions from the new MGM National Harbor venue in Maryland, domestic revenue was down 3% as overall slots handle, table drop and revenue-per-available-room all declined.
National Harbor booked revenue of $186.9m in Q4, good enough for fourth on the domestic resorts revenue chart, behind only the Bellagio and MGM Grand in Las Vegas and the Borgata in Atlantic City. The Mandalay Bay resort ranked fifth, but its Q4 was dealing with issues that National Harbor didn’t face.
The overall Q4 numbers were affected by the mass shooting on the Vegas Strip in early October, during which the shooter held up in Mandalay Bay. Occupancy rates at MGM’s Vegas properties fell four points to 85% during Q4, reflecting the upheaval MGM has been forced to contend with since the shooting.
Speaking to analysts, MGM CEO Jim Murren said the Q4 results were undoubtedly affected by the “clear challenges” presented by the shooting’s aftermath, but said the overall results had been “a touch better” than the company had anticipated.
MGM China had a more positive outcome, with revenue in Macau up 10% to $549m. However, a deferred tax liability pushed operating income down to $43m from $72m one year earlier.
The mass market was largely responsible for MGM China’s revenue gains, as VIP gaming revenue fell 5%. The VIP decline came despite table turnover rising nearly one-quarter, thanks to VIP win rate falling 0.6 points from Q4 2016’s outsized 3.7%.
The new MGM Cotai property opened last week, just in time for the Lunar New Year celebrations, and while MGM China CEO Grant Bowie called it “a challenging time to make any judgments,” he was encouraged by the new venue’s mass table win per unit per day.
Bowie noted that the property was enjoying a lot of lookie-loos from New Year’s revelers, leaving him to wonder “how do I monetize people taking photographs.” However, Bowie said he expects many of those photos to end up on social media, thereby increasing the new venue’s exposure.
MGM Cotai opened with only direct VIP gaming activity but Bowie said the plan was to launch junket-based VIP action by June or July. The Mansion, the new venue’s high-end accommodation, is expected to open by September in what Murren called the “last piece of the puzzle for us to lock in.”
Murren also referenced the imminent sports betting ruling by the US Supreme Court, an opportunity for which he claimed MGM was “really poised to immediately take advantage of.” Murren said sports would be “a significant avenue of growth” for MGM in the future, in part due to the new Las Vegas Golden Knights franchise, which appears set to make the NHL playoffs this spring.
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Ocean Resort Casino, aka former Revel, finished another week of development by listing a few high-profile job openings and showcasing the NJ casino's logo.
The post Almost There: Hiring Spree, New Logo Highlight Busy Week For Ocean Resort Casino appeared first on NJ Gambling Sites.
Caesars went bankrupt because it was part of a heavily leveraged buyout just before the last major financial crisis. It’s been ten years since the last major financial crisis, and Caesars has emerged from that near-death experience leaner, a little bit wiser, and hungry for growth. If it wants to survive the next financial crisis, the best thing it can do is stay conservative and lean out its balance sheet as fast as possible, balancing shareholder expectations and financial health, leaning a bit more heavily towards financial health.
This may not be possible, because shareholders may not stand for it. They want to see growth and they want to see it now, and so does Caesars management. I can’t blame them. Going for growth is fine as long as it’s cheap, but now is definitely not the time to incur more debt or risk for the sake of expansion. According to a report in Bloomberg published in July, expansion is exactly what Caesars is going for:
Las Vegas-based Caesars is chasing opportunities in Japan, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Dubai, [CEO Mark] Frissora said. A planned casino in South Korea catering only to foreigners is still on track, he said, despite a Chinese restriction on travel to the country due to Seoul’s deployment of an antimissile system.
If this was just Frissora sounding off in order to generate some excitement about the company after a long, tiring, depressing bankruptcy, then fine. But expanding into these countries is going to be a problem when core markets in Las Vegas and Atlantic City are at risk of further deterioration.
Even after jettisoning the most toxic parts of its debt, Caesars still holds about $6.7B in total debt. That’s still 72% leverage, not bad for a profitable company, but not great for a company that is still bleeding every quarter. Stripping out all other accounting losses, interest expense alone over the last 4 quarters has outstripped operating profit by 11%. That means, mathematically speaking in the simplest terms, that it’s debt is still too high. And again, this is excluding all other losses.
Caesars needs to grow in order to get back in balance, but growth costs money and Caesars can’t afford to raise more debt in order to achieve that growth. So it’s in a bind. It could raise equity, but that would anger George Soros who recently took a stake in the company. In the event that Caesars does raise equity its share price will be diluted and go down. So how can it grow?
The two things that Caesars has going for it is that, first, investors are interested now because it still has a good brand name and is finally out of bankruptcy. Second, it has a lot of cash on its balance sheet, about $4.3B. I believe the best thing it can do now if it wants to secure a long term future is keep that cash, perhaps raise a little more in equity without infuriating its shareholders too much, and keep it as a rainy day fund. If it goes on a spending spree now, it will be doing the same thing it did in 2008.
Looking at the rest of the balance sheet, even after spinning off its REIT and getting rid of much of its toxic real estate, the company still has over $7B in property plant and equipment. That’s still over three quarters of its market cap, which means most of its valuation is rooted in the hard assets it owns and not its cash flow. Practically then, Caesars is sort of a casino real estate holding company, treading water and still slowly sinking, just not as fast as before. It got rid of some dead weight but that’s all. Property prices are likely to fall soon because bond yields have not stopped rising and likely will not stop rising with the Trump Administration borrowing upwards of a trillion dollars a year from the capital markets. That brings mortgage yields up too, and just like bonds, when yields go up, price goes down. Here’s the 1-year chart of mortgage yields.
Glancing at Caesars tone and plans of late, the picture it wants to present to investors is a company just out bankruptcy looking for growth. If it needs to present that picture in order to attract investment so be it, but what it should actually do is focus on core markets, use its cash balance to improve services as much as possible where it is already strong, satisfy its existing customer base and improve its brand name and image with the assets it already has rather than looking for new markets right now. That way, it has a chance of surviving the turmoil to come in the United States.
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Macau casinos are celebrating after starting off the Year of the Dog more like a mighty mastiff than a wimpy Chihuahua.
According to initial stats released by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO), the number of visitors descending on the special administrative region of China over the first four days (Feb. 15-18) of the Lunar New Year holiday is up 10% year-on-year to just over 500k.
Visitors from Mainland China accounted for 354k (70.8%) of the arrivals, representing an 18.5% improvement over the first four days of the 2017 Lunar New Year.
Last week, MGTO boss Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes predicted that total visitation over the weeklong New Year holiday period would be 1-3% higher than last year’s 935k visitors.
As ever, she emphasized that there’s no hard correlation between visitation and the casinos’ ultimate gaming revenue figures for the period, in part because Chinese VIPs – who still account for the majority of Macau’s gaming revenue – tend to give Macau a wide berth during the new year period to avoid the hordes of riff-raff.
Regardless, the casinos are likely celebrating the double-digit visitor gains, particularly those casinos with a greater focus on mass market gamblers like Sands China and MGM Resorts’ new MGM Cotai property, which opened just days before the holiday period began.
Unfortunately, MGM Cotai’s rush to launch ahead of the New Year holiday meant that only 500 of the property’s expected 1,390 hotel rooms were ready to accept guests, which will obviously limit the property’s revenue-generating potential.
Morgan Stanley analysts issued a note Tuesday suggesting MGM Cotai was their “top pick” to benefit from the thriving mass market, although the analysts warned that “near term volatility and slow ramp are expected.”
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A recent poll shows nearly 70% Americans oppose the NBA and MLB's demand for a cut of sports bets, and the NJ sports betting case is in the spotlight.
The post MLB, NBA Not Winning Fans With Demand For 1 Percent Of Wagers In Sports Bets appeared first on NJ Gambling Sites.
Casino operator Imperial Pacific International (IPI) and Saipan’s governor are pushing back against allegations of corruption made via a Bloomberg News article.
Last week, Bloomberg published a lengthy exposé of what it deemed to be IPI’s dismal worker safety record, the eyebrow-raising numbers generated by its gaming tables and whether financial payments to legislators’ relatives can explain the government’s laissez-faire approach to regulating IPI’s activities.
On Monday, IPI issued a statement calling the latest Bloomberg piece “just another enumeration of false claims similar to those in similar Bloomberg articles.” IPI said it was clear that “the article was written to attack Imperial Pacific, its owners and agents, the Commonwealth Casino Commission, the CNMI government and its leaders, and individual members of the CNMI community.”
Among the latest Bloomberg article’s allegations was the company making “millions of dollars in payments to family members of the territory’s governor, Ralph Deleon Guerrero Torres.” These payments included $126k paid to a law firm run by Torres’ three brothers, a land lease payment of $667k to Torres’ sister-in-law for a property she purchased five months earlier for just $180k, and over $4m in land payments to Serafin Camacho, who’s married to the governor’s first cousin Lillian.
On Monday, the Saipan Tribune quoted the governor’s office saying that the Bloomberg piece “lacks an understanding of the size of the CNMI and that many public officials have extended families.”
Torres (pictured) personally commented that the allegations were “blatantly false and are apparently perpetuated by individuals who hold a minority opinion, aiming to score cheap political points at the expense of our islands’ image in the world stage.”
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands legislators like Rep. Edwin Propst have unsuccessfully advocated for revising the original deal that IPI reached with the government, which famously requires the company to pay business corporation taxes but no taxes on gaming revenue.
The Bloomberg article quoted Propst saying it was his belief that IPI “runs this government. Any legislation they’ve ever wanted goes their way 100% of the time. Not 99% of the time. One hundred.”
Last April, IPI threatened to “take formal legal actions” against Bloomberg for a report that claimed US financial authorities were probing alleged shenanigans at IPI’s former temporary casino Best Sunshine Live.
This time around, IPI says it plans to “explore all legal remedies available at law and take legal action where warranted.” Torres’ office has yet to specify whether it’s mulling its own legal response to the article’s claims.
IPI, which stopped reporting its monthly VIP gambling turnover shortly after the original Bloomberg article, appointed a new top management team last month to replace the outgoing Mark Brown.
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Nolimit City goes live on LeoVegas.com, the multiple-award winning and leading mobile operator. As Nolimit City goes live on LeoVegas.com, Nolimit City games will be showcased on LeoVegas.com and will be included in their ever-growing portfolio of premium mobile slots games, following a distribution deal established in 2017. LeoVegas has agreed to release Nolimit City games through the established platform, ...
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